Prejudiced attitudes and stereotypic beliefs about outgroups can be reflected in language and everyday conversations. Explicit attitudes and beliefs may be expressed through use of group labels, dehumanizing metaphors, or prejudiced humor. More implicit attitudes and beliefs may be leaked through variations in sentence structure and subtle word choices. Empirical work shows that such prejudiced attitudes and stereotypic beliefs can spread within ingroup communities through one-on-one conversation as well as more broadly through vehicles such as news, the entertainment industry, and social media. Individuals also convey their prejudiced beliefs when communicating to outgroup members as message recipients. Outgroups who are members of historically disadvantaged groups, in particular, are targets of controlling or patronizing speech, biased feedback, and nonverbal behavior that leaks bias.
Article
Prejudiced Communication
Janet B. Ruscher
Article
Intergroup Contact
Jake Harwood
Contact between members of different groups has long been advocated as a productive means for reducing intergroup prejudice. The empirical evidence supports this notion, with hundreds of studies indicating that people (especially people from dominant groups) gain more positive attitudes towards other groups (typically non-dominant groups) by communicating with members of those groups. Generalization from the individual group member to the group as a whole is stronger when the target’s group membership is salient during the encounter, albeit that generalization might be positive or negative. Recent years have seen expanded definitions of intergroup contact, moving from direct face-to-face contact to broader realms such as imagining interaction with the outgroup, contacting the outgroup through interactive (e.g., computer) or non-interactive (e.g., broadcast) media, and becoming aware of or observing contact involving other ingroup and outgroup members. Several suggestions for the most effective content of contact have been supplied, but the most definitive recommendation is simply that the contact not be negative: contact involving extensive conflict and negative emotions do not reduce prejudice. The effects of contact can occur through a wide variety of mediators, but the most commonly studied have been anxiety and empathy: contact reduces anxiety and increases empathy, and those emotional responses translate into more positive intergroup attitudes. Counter-intuitively, some evidence suggests that contact is most effective for people with higher levels of pre-existing prejudice. Contact can have some ironic negative effects on progress towards societal equity. In particular, considerable evidence suggests that harmonious intergroup contact can reduce perceptions of inequality and suppress the motivation for social change for dominant and subordinate groups. For subordinate groups specifically, a positive intergroup experience with a dominant group member can reduce the drive to actively challenge the status quo.
Article
Music and Intergroup Communication
Jake Harwood
Music is a powerful form of communication. Many of the functions of music are shared across cultural groups (e.g., its uses in ritual celebration, group coordination, coalition signaling, dance, and the like), and certain musical phenomena are universal (e.g., recognition of octaves, distinguishing music from noise). These universals mean that music has the capacity to bring groups together, offering a communication code that is simultaneously expressive and emotionally intense, while also lacking in traditional semantic meaning (and thus reducing the opportunities for miscommunication between groups). However, music often serves to divide groups, with forms of music signaling or constructing group memberships that are distinct from and in opposition to other groups. Music can even be used to incite intergroup division and hatred, particularly when music and lyrics are combined. As we explore the ways in which communication unites and divides humans, we must look at codes beyond traditional verbal and nonverbal communication. Music is one such code meriting more focused attention from intergroup communication scholars.
Article
Intractability from a Sociopsychological Approach
Daniel Bar-Tal
Intractable conflicts are defined as being protracted, violent, perceived as being of zero-sum nature and unsolvable, total, and central, and parties involved have an interest in their continuation; they are demanding, stressful, painful, exhausting, and costly both in human and material terms. As an adaptation to these conditions societies develop appropriate sociopsychological infrastructure, which includes collective memory, ethos of conflict, and collective emotional orientations. This infrastructure fulfills important functions, on both the individual and collective levels, including the important role of formation, maintenance and strengthening of a social identity that reflects this conflict. It is institutionalized, disseminated, and eventually becomes the foundation for the development of culture of conflict. Its major themes appear in public discourse, cultural products, school books, and societal ceremonies. The emerged culture of conflict ends up serving as a major fueling factor to the continuation of the conflict and as a major obstacle to its peaceful resolution. The infrastructure serves as major sociopsychological barriers. These barriers stand as major obstacles to begin the negotiation, to continue the negotiation, to achieve an agreement and later to engage in a process of reconciliation.
Article
Media Portrayals and Effects: African Americans
Riva Tukachinsky
Content analyses demonstrate continuing improvement in media representations of African Americans. However, research suggests that the progress is uneven across various media and genres, and while underrepresentation and portrayals of blatant stereotypes decline, more subtle stereotypical depictions continue to persist.
Importantly, media representations of race can have consequences for both African-American and White media consumers. Research consistently demonstrates that negative media representations of Blacks have a detrimental effect on Whites’ intergroup attitudes and support for social policies. Positive representations, conversely, have the potential to improve intergroup attitudes. For Black viewers, stereotypical media representations of their own group can pose a psychological threat, whereas sympathetic representations serve as a source of empowerment.
Article
Genocide and Intergroup Communication
William A. Donohue
Understanding intergroup communication in the context of genocide and mass killing begins with an exploration of how this kind of communication can devolve into such heinous human tragedies. How does communication set the stage that enables groups to pursue this path? The literature suggests that genocide is preceded by a period of intense communication that seeks to exacerbate racial divides while also providing social sanctions for killing as a solution to this intergroup strengthening activity. As individuals use language in their intergroup exchanges that seeks to build their own identity through the derogation of an outgroup, they become trapped in a conflict paradox that can then lead to violence or genocide. Strategies for detecting language associated with forming an identity trap and then dealing with it are also discussed.
Article
Indigenous Languages: Their Threatened Extinction Is a Global Responsibility
Diana Cárdenas, Roxane de la Sablonnière, and Donald M. Taylor
Indigenous languages are at the verge of extinction. For many indigenous communities, saving their languages means protecting one of the last-standing symbols of their cultural identity, a symbol that has survived a history of colonization and that can impact their well-being. If indigenous languages are to survive, language revitalization strategies need to be adopted by indigenous communities and governments. One such strategy is language revitalization planning, where communities and governments are actively engaged in changing the way group members use language. Language revitalization plans are often derived from two theoretical stands, either language reversal theory (which adopts a language-autonomy perspective) or language vitality (which focuses on the factors that favor a linguistic group’s survival).
Language revitalization strategies also involve some form of bilingual education. Bilingual education in indigenous communities allows indigenous children to learn, and hence to gain competency in, both their indigenous language and the mainstream language. Strong forms of bilingualism, as opposed to weak forms of bilingualism, have great potential for nourishing competency in indigenous languages, because they give equal value to the indigenous language and the mainstream language.
Language revitalization strategies also need to consider the collective functions of language, or how groups use their language. Language can be used by groups as a vehicle for cultural knowledge, as a symbol of identity, and as a tool for communicating in formal and informal settings. Strengthening the collective function of indigenous languages is essential to their survival.
In the case of indigenous people, every single step taken to revitalize their languages (language planning, bilingual education, and the collective functions of language) is an affirmation of their continuous existence in the world, upholding their distinctiveness from colonizers. This “collective existential affirmation” of indigenous people may very well be the drive needed to achieve language revival.
Article
Interethnic Communication
Federica Pieragostini, Bruno Gabriel Salvador Casara, and Caterina Suitner
Globalization is making interethnic communication an increasingly widespread issue. The reduction of actual and psychological distances due to migratory flows and media communication increases contact opportunities between individuals from different ethnic groups. Communication between members belonging to different ethnic groups can also be considered a challenge as it brings in more general intergroup controversies. Ethnicity affects both verbal and nonverbal communication at different intensity levels. For example, using verbal communication, interethnic conflict may emerge through the use of hate speech, and—at a lower intensity level—may also emerge by the subtle use of pronouns (e.g., avoiding the use of “we” to exclude members of other groups). Similarly, in nonverbal communication, interethnic conflicts may strongly be evident in explicit exclusion behaviors, but also in subtler cues such as by enhancing spatial distance from persons belonging to other groups. Ethnic identities and their implications are also evident in and influenced by mass media narratives, which mirror, establish, and perpetuate inequalities and discrimination. Interethnic communication is therefore a challenge and an opportunity to understand and to improve relationships between ethnic groups.
Article
Communicating Religious Identities
Renate Ysseldyk
Religion encompasses many forms of communication: between groups, within groups, and with God (or other deities). Such communication can be especially powerful when group members highly identify with their religious group and the beliefs therein. Equally, it can be divisive, as evidenced by religion-based intergroup conflict and intolerance (which often overlaps along ethnic or political lines). However, not all religious communication is verbal or explicit. Religious individuals also commonly transmit their beliefs, values, and identities through symbols, physical spaces, and music. Likewise, communication with God is often pursued with silent prayer, meditation, or ritual, which also serve to reinforce one’s spirituality alongside religious group boundaries. Taken together, these varying forms of communication have implications not only for religious intergroup relations (e.g., intergroup contact or conflict), but also for intragroup relations (e.g., the strengthening of social ties) and individual health outcomes (e.g., effective communication with health care providers and coping practices). Given the importance of religious identity for many individuals, the benefits for individual well-being and intragroup relations, and yet the intergroup strife that religious group divisions can incite, the ways in which we communicate our religious group identities deserve closer attention.
Article
Intercultural Friendships
Elisabeth Gareis
Following the devastation of World War II, policymakers and scholars worked to advance international partnerships and mutual understanding. In the 1940s and 1950s, international student exchange programs were launched to foster international good will; training programs for diplomats were created that focused on intercultural communication competence; and researchers turned their attention on how to optimize intergroup relations. Most prominently, Gordon Allport outlined principles of effective intergroup contact in the contact hypothesis. Scholarship based on the contact hypothesis later determined that the potential for friendship is not only a facilitating but also an essential factor for prejudice reduction and optimal intergroup contact. Focusing largely on the friendship experiences of international students studying abroad, research also identified numerous other benefits of intercultural-friendship formation, including stronger language skills, greater life satisfaction, lower levels of stress, and enhanced perceptions of the host country. Despite these benefits, the lack of friendship between sojourners and host nationals is a common finding in intercultural-friendship research and a concern for the many educational institutions worldwide that are attempting to internationalize, in part by attracting international students. Current research, therefore, often focuses on factors that influence intercultural-friendship formation and, increasingly, on measures for promoting intercultural friendship.
First among the factors affecting the development of intercultural friendships is cultural difference. Cultural similarity provides attributional confidence and reduces uncertainty; that is, interactants can more easily predict and explain behaviors in people who are similar to them. Highly dissimilar cultures often exhibit differences in communication patterns, value dimensions, and friendship styles that can impede relationship development, especially in the orientation and exploratory stages of social penetration, during which cultural complexities are most critical. Another prominent factor is the interactants’ motivation to form relationships across cultural lines. In one of the prime arenas for intercultural contact, international student exchange, for example, sojourners seeking cultural knowledge and personal growth generally have more interest in interaction and friendships with host nationals than students who are task oriented and focus on education for better career prospects after returning home. Similarly, host environment factors, such as host receptivity (ranging from welcoming attitudes to discrimination) influence the likelihood with which intercultural friendships are formed. Other factors affecting intercultural-friendship formation include communicative competence, intercultural sensitivity, and aspects of identity and personality (e.g., cultural versus personal identification, empathy, and open-mindedness). Among measures for promoting intercultural-friendship formation are infrastructures that facilitate proximity and frequency of contact, provide foreign language training, support experience abroad, and offer intercultural education and training to further intercultural competence and the appreciation of difference.
Article
Behavioral Indicators of Discrimination in Social Interactions
Abigail R. Corrington, Mikki Hebl, and Jo-Ann Tsang
A growing number of studies are utilizing different sorts of behavioral indicators as measures of prejudice and discrimination. Although there are few foolproof behavioral indicators of discrimination (cf. verbal articulations of overt discrimination), patterns of behaviors can often be reliable indicators of discrimination. There are three sets of behavioral indicators. First, there are verbal behaviors such as overt insults or the use of pejorative words to describe stigmatized individuals. Such verbal statements, particularly when overt, make attributions of perceiver prejudice very straightforward. Such exchanges appear to be on the rise and are particularly worthy of study following the apparent 2016 “whitelash” and resistance to acting in ways deemed to be “politically correct.” Other forms of verbal behaviors involve more indirect expressions of prejudice, such as ambiguous comments and subjective references. Second, there are paraverbal behaviors that may index discrimination. For instance, individuals’ tone and pacing of speech may intentionally or unintentionally signal their disapproval or dislike of a stigmatized target. These behaviors are less commonly studied by social scientists but provide indicators about an individual’s intentions toward a stigmatized target. Third and finally, there are both nonverbal microbehaviors (e.g., gestures, eye contact) and macrobehaviors (e.g., avoidance, helping behavior). Behavioral measures—both classic and more state-of-the-art—that might serve as indicators of discrimination have been identified in recent research, and researchers should continue to learn more about them and use them.
Article
Conflict and Perceived Threat in Eastern Africa
Elvis Nshom
Conflict and prejudice are universal phenomena and represent a major concern in most societies, especially on the African continent. Worldwide, just a few cases, such as the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Sudan, Eritrea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, and Nigeria, have revealed how destructive prejudice and conflict can be to societies. Eastern Africa is a region that has been tremendously affected by conflict. Unfortunately, nations like Sudan and Somalia have been torn apart by many years of conflict. This has inevitably led to other societal challenges or difficulties, such as displacements, poverty, and famine. The question of why people get into conflict has been examined and debated internationally, especially in the field of social psychology. However, conflict in Eastern African cannot be explained merely by psychology. In order to have a holistic understanding of conflict, especially in Africa, it is important not only to look at social psychological factors, such as prejudice, but also to consider important political, economic, and social factors that may be related to the particular conflict, because the African context is extremely complex and the causes of conflict can sometimes be intertwined.
Article
European Union: Integration, National, and European Identities
Stephen M. Croucher
The European Union (EU) is an economic, political, and social conglomeration of 28 member nations. These member nations work together via a system of supranational institutional and intergovernmental-negotiated treaties and decisions by member states. While the EU has been able to continue its development in various stages since the 1950s respectively, a key issue continually facing the EU has always been integration at different levels. Integration of new member states, integration of individuals and cultures within member states, and most recently integration of immigrants (newcomers of different designations) into the EU.
While the EU has strict guidelines regarding the integration of new member states into the EU, no policies/procedures are in place regarding the integration of individuals into the EU. Issues of national sovereignty are critical to EU member states when discussing how to integrate newcomers. Most recently during the heightened wave of refugees entering the EU through its southern and eastern borders, the issue of how to integrate newcomers into the EU has come to the forefront of national and EU policymakers. Key questions facing the EU and its member states include: What are the national integration policies, and how do they differ? What is the future for the EU in response to increased legal, illegal, and irregular migration?
Article
Intergroup Communication and Reconciliation: Experiences from the Former Yugoslavia
Vesna Nikolić-Ristanović
Intergroup communication is an important aspect of dealing with intergroup conflicts in post-conflict societies, including countries of the former Yugoslavia. Widespread monolithic and authoritarian communication is one of the main obstacles to constructive communication about the past in the former Yugoslavia, and the challenges involved in shifting the nature of communication, although rarely addressed and explored, seem to be a condition sine qua non of effective reconciliation efforts. This should include contact and communication issues as well as the very process through which the shift from authoritarian (one-way) communication, which perpetuates conflicts, to inclusive (two-way) communication, which has reconciliatory potential, can be achieved. Allport’s intergroup contact hypothesis, its revisions and further elaborations in relation to the use of inclusive communication for overcoming divisions and reaching reconciliation in post-conflict societies, as well as restorative and transformative justice literature, including experiences of using yoga as part of restorative justice and reconciliation programs, can serve as good theoretical departures.
As we explore communication as a way toward reconciliation in post-conflict societies using as an illustration experiences from the former Yugoslavia, we need to be aware of intergroup communication on the macro, meso, and micro level and its impact on reconciliation after the armed conflicts of the 1990s. Conflicts on the macro level include conflicts between the states, or on the level of the society, while meso-level conflicts are intergroup conflicts; micro-level conflicts relate to interpersonal conflicts. Also we need to understand the scope and nature of interethnic and other intercultural conflicts, as well as their socio-historical context and impact on intergroup communication. Thus, addressing intergroup communication in a constructive and inclusive way while dealing with the past and implementing reconciliation initiatives is important. Intergroup communication initiatives that foster reconciliation in particular need to be identified and explored, as examples of the practice of establishing inclusive communication and binding people from different ethnic groups and those affected by armed conflicts in different ways together.
Article
Uncertainty and Extremism
Sucharita Belavadi
Uncertainty regarding the self—about who we are, our place in the world, and our future is typically an unsettling and aversive state. It is a state that we are motivated to reduce in order to gain predictability over events in the world around us. One of the most effective ways of managing uncertainty regarding the self is by seeking group memberships and belonging to groups. Thus, uncertainty reduction can be construed as a drive, such that we join and identify with groups in order to manage uncertainty about and related to the self; this is the core tenet of uncertainty-identity theory, which discusses uncertainty reduction as one of the motives for seeking group memberships.
Previous work in uncertainty-identity theory has shown that when uncertain about the self, individuals seek highly entitative groups to identify with. Such groups are characterized by clear, distinct boundaries—a clear sense of what the group stands for while spelling out who we are versus who we are not. Highly entitative groups have interdependent members and a clear sense of identity that is distinct from those of other groups. According to uncertainty-identity theory, identifying with such groups can reduce self-uncertainty, as individuals can define the self in terms of a clear, distinct prototype and manage uncertainty regarding who they are. Research in uncertainty-identity theory shows that when uncertain, group members perceptually polarize their group away from the outgroup in order to enhance the perceived entitativity and distinctiveness of their group prototype relative to other groups. Thus, the group moves to an extreme and polarized position that is far removed from that of an outgroup with the need to fashion a distinctive identity. The preference for a clearly defined and highly entitative social identity that helps delineate who we are versus who we are not when group members are self-uncertain should increase group members’ vulnerability to ingroup rhetoric that emphasizes the distinctiveness of group boundaries and an us versus them thinking. This is a dangerous trend, especially in the context of intergroup conflict, as influential group members, such as leaders, might seek to mobilize group members by demonizing outgroup members while attributing suffering and unpredictability experienced by ingroup members to the actions of outgroup members. Thus, gaining an understanding of the processes through which the uncertainty of group members is exploited to mobilize support for extreme ideologies might be one way to explain extremism and radical behavior by groups.
Article
Acculturation and Intergroup Communication
Richard Y. Bourhis
Acculturation is the process of bidirectional change that occurs when two ethnolinguistic groups come in sustained contact with one another. Acculturation usually occurs between groups of unequal power, status, and demographic background. At stake for the unity of multilingual states are intergroup relations between language minorities and majorities that yield harmonious to conflictual outcomes. The Interactive Acculturation Model (IAM) is adapted to intergroup relations between language communities in four parts. The first part of the model provides an overview of the ethnolinguistic vitality framework accounting for the strength of minority/majority language communities as they struggle to gain the institutional support they need to develop as distinctive and thriving language communities. The second part of the IAM offers an analysis of the pluralist, civic, assimilationist, and exclusionist ideologies that underpin language policies regulating the co-existence of minority/majority language communities. The third part examines the acculturation orientations endorsed by majority and minority language group speakers. The fourth part of the IAM proposes that the interaction of majority and minority acculturation orientations yield intergroup communication outcomes that may range from harmonious, problematic, to conflictual. Taken together, the IAM model offers a conceptual tool for analyzing the fate of linguistic minorities as they seek to survive in the dominant majority group environments of post-modern globalizing states.
Article
Apprehension and Anxiety in Communication
Diyako Rahmani
Intergroup anxiety is a form of restlessness and negative feeling caused by communicating with someone with a different social and cultural identity. Just like any other form of anxiety, intergroup anxiety has negative consequences, such as disability in social interactions, weak cognitive performance, and even life consequences. Intergroup anxiety is the result of fear of being disapproved, embarrassed, and rejected across different racial, ethnic, religious, and social groups’ interactions. Theoretically, intergroup anxiety is influenced by the previous experiences one has had with the members of other groups, one’s knowledge of other groups, and the situation in which one interacts with other groups. Intergroup anxiety has behavioral, cognitive, and affective consequences. There are different theories of communication that explain the nature and function of intergroup anxiety. Uncertainty reduction theory, for example, defines anxiety as a result of uncertainty and asserts that to maintain communication, parties should decrease their uncertainty and consequently their anxiety. Anxiety/uncertainty management theory focuses on anxiety and argues that to have effective communication the level of intergroup anxiety should be managed between a minimum and a maximum threshold. A decrease in anxiety and uncertainty is also essential to intercultural adaptation. Different factors can increase the amount of anxiety in intergroup contexts, namely ethnocentrism, prejudice, and discrimination. These factors are related to individuals’ feeling of threat due to one or some of the following: intergroup conflict, unequal group status, in-group identification, knowledge of out-group, and intergroup contact. To settle intergroup conflicts individuals are advised to establish more high-quality intergroup contacts and to change the way they make distinctions among various groups. Quality intergroup contact can be reached through strategies such as establishing cross-cultural friendships and intergroup disclosure. One form of intergroup anxiety is intercultural communication apprehension, which is the apprehension individuals feel due to real or imagined intercultural communication. Intercultural communication apprehension is positively correlated with uncertainty and ethnocentrism, and negatively correlated with intercultural willingness to communicate.
Article
Public Discourse and Intergroup Communication
Mikaela L. Marlow
Discourse analysis is focused on the implicit meanings found in public discourse, text, and media. In the modern era, public discourse can be assessed in political or social debates, newspapers, magazines, television, film, radio, music, and web-mediated forums (Facebook, Twitter, and other public discussion). Research across a variety of disciplines has documented that dominant social groups tend to employ certain discursive strategies when discussing minority groups. Public discourse is often structured in ways that marginalize minority groups and legitimize beliefs, values, and ideologies of more dominant groups. These discursive strategies include appealing to authority, categorization, comparison, consensus, counterfactual, disclaimers, euphemism, evidence, examples, generalizations, rhetorical questions, metaphors, national glorification, and directive speech acts. Evoking such discourse often enables prevailing dominant groups to reify majority social status, reinforce negative assumptions about minorities, and maintain a positive public social image, despite deprecating and, sometimes, dehumanizing references.
Article
Group Status
Fabio Lorenzi-Cioldi
Group status refers to the extent to which members of a group are respected and admired by others. All known societies are characterized by status stratifications, with the most advantaged groups enjoying a more-than-fair share of the total wealth and prestige. Most ordinary criteria to categorize people into groups possess value connotations that eventually uphold prestige hierarchies. Gender, ethnicity, and age—but also disability, weight, sexual orientation, and of course education, income, and class background—are major criteria of social stratification. Established status characteristics may consist of ascribed (e.g., gender) or achieved (e.g., occupation) qualities. They may further consist of groups with more (e.g., gender) or less (e.g., race, social class) contact and mutual interdependence. Status hierarchies are manifold, and the best metaphor encompassing their diversity is that of a vertical dimension that ranks groups’ status and prestige. Generally, members of high-status groups praise individualistic and autonomous self-conceptions and show self-directedness, whereas the opposite tendencies prevail toward the bottom of the status hierarchy. Socialization practices (e.g., parental education, peers, school, and the workplace) take center stage in explaining how members of status groups acquire these contrasting habits and characteristics. However, recent social psychological research sheds light on more general processes related to how people interpret and react to specific situations. Major contributions of social psychological analyses of group status are found in social identity theory, social role theory, status construction theory, the stereotype content model, and social dominance and system justification theories. Despite substantial differences, these perspectives complement each other to account for the formation, the maintenance, and the change of status hierarchies. Status hierarchies are not only pervasive and inevitable but also crucial in their consequences. Status contributes to a wealth of phenomena, including subjective well-being, mental, and physical health, etc. Important for the present discussion is research investigating how group status affects verbal and nonverbal communication between members of high- and low-status groups.
Article
Norm Talk and Intergroup Communication
Sucharita Belavadi
Norms are regularized patterns of attitudes and behavior that characterize a group of individuals, separate the group from other groups of individuals, and prescribe and describe attitudes and behaviors for group members. Relying on social identity theory and self-categorization theory, the role played by group norms within groups and the processes by which such norms are promulgated within groups are discussed. Norm talk or the communication of normative information within groups is explored, as a major proportion of communication within groups is dedicated to clarifying ingroup identities and group attributes such as attitudes and behaviors that characterize the group. Group members can glean normative information by attending to norm talk for instance, by listening to the content of fellow group members’ communications, from their behavior, and from influential or prototypical sources within the group.
According to self-categorization theory, once individuals categorize themselves as members of a salient group or category, they represent normative information cognitively as ingroup prototypes. Prototypes are a fuzzy set of group attributes (such as attitudes and behaviors that characterize the group) and simultaneously minimize differences within groups while maximizing differences between groups. Thus, clear group prototypes help create distinct identities that are clearly demarcated from other groups. Group members should be especially attentive to information that flows from prototypical sources within groups—such as leaders and ingroup media sources—while efforts should be made to differentiate from marginal or deviant members who deviate from the prototype and reduce clarity of ingroup prototypes. The processes through which attending to information communicated by different sources within groups—both prototypical and non-prototypical—help group members seek normative information and clarification of ingroup prototypes are discussed.
