Diane Mackie

University of California, Santa Barbara | UCSB · Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

We tested three hypotheses derived from intergroup emotions theory: that group-based emotions, emotions felt as a member of a group, (1) are influenced by group norms, (2) especially for highly identified group members, and (3) are relatively more positive for highly identified members. Hypothesis 4 tested the prediction that these self-categorizat...

Emotions are linked to wide sets of action tendencies, and it can be difficult to predict which specific action tendency will be motivated or indulged in response to individual experiences of emotion. Building on a functional perspective of emotion, we investigate whether anger and shame connect to different behavioral intentions in dignity, face,...

People's emotions toward their ingroups and salient outgroups often change over time as a result of changing circumstances or intentional self-regulation. To investigate such dynamics, two studies assessed participants' perceived past, present, and ideal levels of group-based emotions toward ingroups and outgroups, for several different types of gr...

This research studied the influence of multiple social identities on the emotions that athletes felt toward their teammates/partners and opponents. Athletes (N = 714) from individual and team-based sports reported their identification both as athletes of the sport and as athletes of their club before reporting their precompetitive emotions. The res...

In a secularizing world, religious groups are increasingly threatened by anti‐religious groups. We present two studies investigating religious peoples’ responses to anti‐religious threats. We expected intergroup threats to shape group‐based emotions and behavioural intentions through a novel pathway whereby threat affects group‐based meta‐emotions:...

Recently, novel lines of research have developed to study the influence of identity processes in sport-related behaviors. Yet, whereas emotions in sport are the result of a complex psychosocial process, little attention has been paid to examining the mechanisms that underlie how group membership influences athletes’ emotional experiences. The prese...

Purpose: In team sports, players have to manage personal interests and group goals, emphasizing intricacies between personal and social identities. The focus of this article was to examine the effect of identity mechanisms on appraisal processes, based on the following research question: Does the level of self-abstraction (low [personal identity] v...

Emotions are a ubiquitous aspect of interaction between groups. As described in Intergroup Emotions Theory (IET; Mackie, Devos, & Smith, 2000; Smith, 1993), intergroup emotions are emotions people feel on account of their membership in a group to which they belong and with which they identify. In this chapter, we first describe the foundational ass...

How can prejudices and stereotypes be stable over a period of thousands of years and yet unstable over only a few weeks? Payne, Vuletich, and Lundberg (2017) address similar puzzles. In light of the fact that the stereotypic biases revealed by individuals on implicit tests vary dramatically over the course of a few weeks, these authors ask how is i...

It has been shown that subtle contextual primes produce transient changes in stereotypes (Santos et al., 2012), an effect supposedly caused by both activation of the primed trait and failure of belief monitoring. The present research investigated people's ability to avoid the influence of primes. A first pilot experiment used a subliminal-priming p...

Group-based emotions are experienced as a result of group categorization and group identification. We first review the transformative idea that emotion can occur as a group-level phenomenon driven by group-level processes. We then briefly review the impact of this idea on research about intragroup processes and intergroup relations in the decades s...

People from honor cultures show heightened emotional responses to insults to their social image. The current research investigates whether people from honor cultures also show heightened protection of social identities. We find that honor concerns may be embedded in some social identities but not others, and that those identities associated with ho...

Emotions can be experienced not only at the individual level, but also on behalf of social groups by people who belong to and identify with those groups. As outlined in Intergroup Emotions Theory, these emotions are driven by appraisals of objects or events in terms of their relevance for the group (rather than the individual). They shift depending...

When forecasting how they will feel in the future, people overestimate the impact that imagined negative events will have on their affective states, partly because they underestimate their own psychological resiliency. Because self-affirmation enhances resiliency, two studies examined whether self-affirmation prior to forecasting reduces the extrem...

Previous research shows that the experience of familiarity involves the experience of positive affect. In two experiments we clarify and extend this research by showing that the experience of familiarity involves the experience of positive affect even when the nature of the experimental task is non-affective and non-evaluative and even when partici...

Emotions are increasingly being recognised as important aspects of prejudice and intergroup behaviour. Specifically, emotional mediators play a key role in the process by which intergroup contact reduces prejudice towards outgroups. However, which particular emotions are most important for prejudice reduction, as well as the consistency and general...

The Representation and Incorporation of Close Others' Responses model (RICOR; Smith and Mackie, 2015 [. 1••]) proposes that social influence occurs because (1) people naturally and spontaneously construct mental representations of others' responses or experiences (their beliefs, emotions, attitudes, or behaviors) and (2) those representations are t...

Persuasive appeals sometimes include expressions of anger in an attempt to influence message recipients' thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. The current research investigated how angry expressions change the way in which a persuasive appeal is considered. In five experiments, participants reported more favorable attitudes towards strong than weak a...

Research has shown that familiarity induced by prior exposure can decrease analytic processing and increase reliance on heuristic processing, including the use of stereotypes (the familiarity-stereotyping effect). We hypothesize that the familiarity-stereotyping effect will occur only when a stereotype provides information that fits with the judgme...

In three experiments, we used a novel Implicit Association Test procedure to investigate the impact of group memberships on implicit bias and implicit group boundaries. Results from Experiment 1 indicated that categorizing targets using a shared category reduced implicit bias by increasing the extent to which positivity was associated with Blacks....

People’s emotional states often depend on the emotions of others. Consequently, to predict their own responses to social interactions (i.e., affective forecasts), we contend that people predict the emotional states of others (i.e., empathic forecasts). We propose that empathic forecasts are vulnerable to stereotype biases and demonstrate that stere...

We propose a new model of social influence, which can occur spontaneously and in the absence of typically assumed motives. We assume that perceivers routinely construct representations of other people's experiences and responses (beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and behaviors), when observing others' responses or simulating the responses of unobserved...

Over-time variability characterizes not only individual-level emotions, but also group-level emotions, those that occur when people identify with social groups and appraise events in terms of their implications for those groups. We discuss theory and research regarding the role of emotions in intergroup contexts, focusing on their dynamic nature. W...

The goal of this article is to review how, when, and why fluency, or processing ease, affects attitudes. The current article first defines fluency and then discusses its direct impact on attitudes, noting that fluency usually makes attitudes more positive and that it does so for a wide array of attitude objects. Mechanisms and moderators of these d...

When the social identities people develop as members of groups become salient, people perceive the world in terms of the costs and benefits to that salient group membership. This means that events that have no implications for the individual him or herself can be perceived as harmful, beneficial, offensive, complimentary, unfair, or just, for examp...

We discuss a novel form of priming that (a) involves the activation of embodied as well as mental representations in the perceiver and (b) is caused by the observation or simulation of the belief, attitude, emotion, or behavior of one or more other people. As in any form of priming, the representation, once activated, may have effects on the percei...

In this article, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) Task Force on Publication and Research Practices offers a brief statistical primer and recommendations for improving the dependability of research. Recommendations for research practice include (a) describing and addressing the choice of N (sample size) and consequent issues...

Although stereotypes have traditionally been regarded as stable, research has documented their considerable malleability. One potential source of such malleability is intrusion into the stereotype of other concepts also activated when the stereotype is activated. In three experiments we assessed the extent to which stereotypes were influenced by st...

Four experiments demonstrated that perceptual fluency can facilitate categorization of others as ingroup members. In Experiment 1 (replications A, B, and C), White participants were first exposed to a group of White target individuals and later judged whether fluent (repeated) and disfluent (novel) targets were members of a particular ingroup or no...

Three studies integrated crossed-categorization and discrete emotion approaches to prejudice and prejudice reduction. Study 1 made salient crossed-categorization using naturally occurring groups and examined the ability of emotions to account for prejudiced evaluations. Study 2 constructed novel crossed-categorizations in the laboratory to examine...

According to intergroup emotion theory, the impact of many intergroup events on intergroup outcomes is mediated by group-directed emotions. We demonstrate that the ability of apology to reduce retribution against and increase forgiveness of a transgressing outgroup is contributed to by discrete intergroup emotions. We examined both negative (anger...

What can motivate members of disadvantaged groups to take action on behalf of their group? This research assessed a model in which measured perceptions of (study 1) and manipulated information about (study 2) other women’s anger influenced female participants’ group-based anger, their subsequent appraisals of instances of possible discrimination, a...

We provide evidence for a previously unstudied consequence of the relationship that familiarity has with positive affect: Positive affect and familiarity exert a bi-directional impact on latencies to judgments about the other. Experiment 1 showed that this association caused predictable facilitation and inhibition patterns on both evaluative and re...

When an individual is categorized as a member of a group, the individual’s social identity becomes his or her frame for perceiving the world. This research investigates how information can be perceived and processed differently when relevant social identities are salient. In two studies, participants’ individual, student, or American identities wer...

The notion that language can shape social perception has a long history in psychology. The current work adds to this literature by investigating the relationship between ingroup-designating pronouns and perceptions of familiarity. In two experiments, participants were exposed to nonsense syllables that were primed with ingroup (e.g., we) and contro...

According to Intergroup Emotions Theory people categorized as group members experience the emotions of their ingroup as a consequence of that membership. Four experiments showed that participants converged toward what they believed to be their specific ingroup’s distinct emotional experience when reporting emotions as group members, but not when re...

A commitment framework based on Moreland and Levine's theory of socialization in groups (Levine & Moreland, 1994; Moreland & Levine, 1982, 2000) is applied to the previously neglected problem of group exit. Specifically, an ex-member's desire to rejoin a former group is predicted from two factors: (1) the ex-member's commitment to his or her former...

Previous research [Smith, E. R., Seger, C. R., & Mackie, D. M. (2007). Can emotions be truly group-level? Evidence regarding four conceptual criteria. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 431–446] has demonstrated that when people are explicitly asked about the emotions they experience as members of a particular group, their reported e...

Two studies were designed to investigate the relations among ethnic group membership, ethnic group identification, group based-appraisals, and group-based emotions in determining behavioral tendencies of support and opposition toward diversity initiatives. The two studies confronted participants with the hire of an ethnic minority under a diversity...

We apply Intergroup Emotion Theory – a theory that considers emotion as a group-based phenomenon - to argue that the way diverse team members cognitively appraise a situation (concerning relationships or the task at hand) and react emotionally about it, and the extent to which they intend to act on it or not, will be a function of their identificat...

When the social identities people develop as members of groups become salient, people perceive the world in terms of the costs and benefits to that salient group membership. This means that events that have no implications for the individual him or herself can be perceived as harmful, beneficial, offensive, complimentary, unfair, or just, for examp...

Imagine that you are a white student waiting with two other students, one black and one white, for a psychology experiment to begin. The black student steps out of the room for a moment, lightly bumping against the white student on his way out. While he is out of earshot, the white student comments, "Typical, I hate it when black people do that." H...

Familiar people are especially persuasive spokespersons. Here, a fluency attribution model of spokesperson familiarity was tested. Specifically, it was hypothesized that repeated exposure to a spokesperson would create fluency that, in a persuasive context, could be attributed to the persuasive message or to another fluency-relevant cue (e.g., the...

Repeated statements are perceived as more valid than novel ones, termed the illusion of truth effect, presumably because repetition imbues the statement with familiarity. In 3 studies, the authors examined the conditions under which and the processes by which familiarity signals from repetition and argument quality signals from processing of messag...

Two studies were designed to investigate the relations among ethnic group membership, ethnic group identification, group based-appraisals, and group-based emotions in determining behavioral tendencies of support and opposition toward diversity initiatives. The two studies confronted participants with the hire of an ethnic minority under a diversity...

Attitudes research has shown that evaluations assessed directly (explicit attitudes) and indirectly (implicit attitudes) can diverge for many reasons. However, only recently has work begun to examine the phenomenology of experiencing discrepant explicit and implicit attitudes, and a number of important questions remain unanswered. What are the cons...

Intergroup emotions theory seeks to understand and improve intergroup relations by focusing on the emotions engendered by belonging to, and by deriving identity from, a social group (processes called self-categorization and identification). Intergroup emotions are shaped by the very different ways in which members of different groups see group-rele...

Intergroup emotions theory (IET) posits that when social categorization is salient, individuals feel the same emotions as others who share their group membership. Extensive research supporting this proposition has relied heavily on self-reports of group-based emotions. In three experiments, the authors provide converging evidence that group-based a...

Drawing on Intergroup Emotions Theory [Mackie, D. M., Maitner, A. T., & Smith, E. R. (in press). Intergroup emotions theory. In T.D. Nelson (Ed.), Handbook of Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Discrimination, New York: Erlbaum.], we propose that a perceiver’s emotional reactions toward other social groups can change in response to situationally induced...

We investigated the positivity–cues–familiarity effect and the hypothesis that it is caused by a misattribution of positivity to a sense of familiarity. Participants were put in a positive or neutral mood state, and then either did or did not complete a mood-manipulation check question. Participants then rendered old/new judgments of stimuli to whi...

The authors explored how social group cues (e.g., obesity, physical attractiveness) strongly associated with valence affect the formation of attitudes toward individuals. Although explicit attitude formation has been examined in much past research (e.g., S. T. Fiske & S. L. Neuberg, 1990), in the current work, the authors considered how implicit as...

Intergroup Influence in Historical PerspectiveProcessing Approaches to Intergroup InfluenceSelf-Categorization Approaches to Intergroup InfluenceContributions to Intergroup Influence from the Majority/Minority LiteratureConclusions: On the Nature of Influence in an Intergroup ContextNotesReferences

Intergroup emotions theory seeks to understand and improve intergroup relations by focusing on the emotions engendered by belonging to, and by deriving identity from, a social group (processes called self-categorization and identification). Intergroup emotions are shaped by the very different ways in which members of different groups see group-rele...

We investigated the effects of familiarity on person perception. We predicted that familiarity would increase non-analytic processing, reducing attention to and the impact of individuating information, and increasing the impact of category labels on judgments about a target person. In two studies participants read either incriminating or exculpator...

Quickly and accurately perceiving others' facial affect is paramount for successful social interaction. This work investigates the role of familiarity in helping us to interpret others' facial emotions. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants viewed several faces, some familiar and some novel, and judged how happy each face appeared. As predicted, res...

Recent advances in understanding prejudice and intergroup behavior have made clear that emotions help explain people's reactions to social groups and their members. Intergroup emotions theory (D. M. Mackie, T. Devos, & E. R. Smith, 2000; E. R. Smith, 1993) holds that intergroup emotions are experienced by individuals when they identify with a socia...

In this chapter we apply intergroup emotion theory (IET; Mackie, Devos, & Smith, 2000) to reflect on the conditions under which individuals may experience intergroup emotions in workgroups, and to explore some possible consequences of those emotions. First, we briefly outline IET and describe the psychological mechanisms underlying intergroup emoti...

Because angry people apparently rely on heuristic cues when making judgments, anger has been claimed to trigger superficial, nonanalytic information processing. In three studies, the authors found that induced anger promoted analytic processing. Experiment 1 showed that angry participants were more likely to discriminate between weak and strong arg...

The consequences of holding an entity (i.e., the belief that a group's characteristics are fixed) or incremental (i.e., the belief that a group's characteristics are malleable) implicit theory about groups was examined for stereotyping and perceptions of group entitativity. Two studies showed that implicit theories about groups affect stereotyping...

Three studies investigated the role of intergroup satisfaction in intergroup conflict. After reading about real acts of aggression committed by an ingroup, participants reported how those actions made them feel and how much they would support similar aggression in the future. In all three studies, experiencing intergroup satisfaction increased supp...

It is hard to imagine studying the psychology of intergroup relations without a theory of group-based emotions. The everyday language of social issues, after all, betrays the importance of emotion in both intergroup prejudice and intragroup cohesion: ‘hate crime’, ‘Black pride’, ‘guilty liberals’, ‘homophobia’, ‘Islamophobia’, ‘angry White males’,...

a b s t r a c t Individuals can often accurately perceive others' emotions in a purely interpersonal context. However, when people identify with an important ingroup, they experience distinctive patterns. Can emotions be truly group-level? Evidence regarding four con-ceptual criteria. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 431–446]. Thus...

In this chapter we apply intergroup emotion theory (IET; Mackie, Devos, & Smith, 2000) to reflect on the conditions under which individuals may experience intergroup emotions in workgroups, and to explore some possible consequences of those emotions. First, we briefly outline IET and describe the psychological mechanisms underlying intergroup emoti...

Because different processes underlie implicit and explicit attitudes, we hypothesized that they are differentially sensitive to different kinds of information. We measured implicit and explicit attitudes over time, as different types of attitude-relevant information about a single attitude object were presented. As expected, explicit attitudes form...

If intergroup emotions are functional, successfully implementing an emotion-linked behavioral tendency should discharge the emotion, whereas impeding the behavioral tendency should intensify the emotion. We investigated the emotional consequences of satisfying or thwarting emotionally induced intergroup behavioral intentions. Study 1 showed that if...

Stereotypes have been assumed to be long-lasting knowledge structures that persist even in the face of contrary evidence. However, there is almost no within-participant research relevant to this assumption. The authors describe 4 studies (N=267), the first 3 of which assessed within-participant stereotype stability over a few weeks with measures of...

Two experiments show that repeated exposure to information about a target person reduces individuation and thereby increases stereotyping of the target person based on social group memberships. The effect is not due to familiarity-induced liking (the mere exposure effect), nor is it mediated by increased accessibility of the target’s social categor...

The current research investigated participants' reactions to positive and negative comments directed toward them as individuals or as members of a social group. Using both perspective-taking (Studies 1 and 2) and actual interaction methodologies (Study 3), three studies found that participants generally responded negatively to negative comments reg...

Three experiments investigated the effects of positive mood on perceptions of variability within and between groups. Participants formed impressions of two different and highly variable groups under a neutral or positive mood. When participants expected to learn about both groups, positive mood increased perceived intergroup similarity but did not...

That emotions arise in intergroup contexts is of course uncontroversial. We are thrilled when our national team wins the World Cup against stiff competition, angry when protesters in another country burn our flag, excited as the party we voted for wins the election, and disgusted when local college students brawl drunkenly with a neighboring school...

Two broad distal causes of prejudice are past history of intergroup contact and general political predispositions. Two studies investigate the extent to which these effects are mediated by emotions directed at the outgroup, as proposed by Intergroup Emotions Theory (Smith, 1993). In both studies, past intergroup contact and Social Dominance Orienta...

Past research has suggested that familiarity with a message, brought about by repetition, can increase (Cacioppo & Petty, 1989) or decrease (Garcia-Marques & Mackie, 2001) analytic (systematic) processing of that message. Two experiments attempted to resolve these contradictory findings by examining how personal relevance may moderate the impact of...

Given that familiarity is closely associated with positivity, the authors sought evidence for the idea that positivity would increase perceived familiarity. In Experiment 1, smiling and thus positively perceived novel faces were significantly more likely to be incorrectly judged as familiar than novel faces with neutral expressions. In Experiment 2...

To assess the persuasive impact of prior source exposure, two studies paired persuasive messages with a source to whom participants had previously been exposed subliminally, explicitly, or not at all. In Experiment 2, participants' attention also was drawn to information that potentially undermined the implications of any reaction to re-exposure. C...

Three experiments examined the influence of perceivers' attitudes on their outcome-biased trait inferences. Participants supporting or opposing mandatory teacher testing read about the attempts of a teacher to pass a competency test. In all experiments, participants supportive of mandatory teacher testing made outcome-biased inferences about the te...

Two experiments demonstrated that a subjective feeling of familiarity determined whether participants processed persuasive information analytically (systematically) or non-analytically (heuristically). In the first experiment, individuals unfamiliar with message content showed differential attitude change when strong versus weak arguments were pres...

In two experiments participants saw stereotype-incongruent information that was either high or low in variability. Following exposure participants generated distributions of group members from which central tendency and variability information was calculated. The comprehensive retrieval model (Garcia-Marques & Mackie, 1999) predicted greater change...

Three studies tested the idea that when social identity is salient, group-based appraisals elicit specific emotions and action tendencies toward out-groups. Participants' group memberships were made salient and the collective support apparently enjoyed by the in-group was measured or manipulated. The authors then measured anger and fear (Studies 1...

Three studies tested the idea that when social identity is salient, group-based appraisals elicit specific emotions and action tendencies toward out-groups. Participants’ group memberships were made salient and the collective support apparently enjoyed by the in-group was measured or manipulated. The authors then measured anger and fear (Studies 1...

Reports an error in "The impact of stereotype-incongruent information on perceived group variability and stereotype change" by Leonel Garcia-Marques and Diane M. Mackie ( Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999[Nov], Vol 77[5], 979-990). In this article, Table 3 (p. 987) contained an error. The row "Number of subgroups" was inadvertently...

Three experiments showed increases in the perceived variability of social groups after perceivers received stereotype-incongruent information about group members. In Experiment 1, participants generated flatter distributions after exposure to incongruent information, compared with equally deviant congruent information, in the form of typical verbal...

In social psychology, specific research traditions, which often spring up in response to external events or social problems, tend to perpetuate the theoretical assumptions and methodological approaches with which they began. As a result, theories and methods that have proven powerful in 1 topic area are often not applied in other areas, even to con...