Can Priming Community Collectivism Mitigate Chinese In-group Favoritism?

Keywords: Ingroup favoritism, Chinese culture, Community collectivism

Abstract: Chi et al. (2019) found that Chinese were tolerant of mistreatment if the perpetrator was someone they knew, but not tolerant of the same behavior by strangers. This kind of favoritism towards known others was eliminated by triggering “group” collectivism that encouraged subjects to think of their own similarity to all people. We ask if a similar reduction of favoritism would occur if culturally Chinese participants were asked to hold a “community” perspective, which is broader than “relational” collectivism, but narrower than “group” collectivism. We conducted a scenario-based, quasi-experimental study with 128 subjects, which showed that the priming of “community” exerted a similar effect as priming of “group” collectivism.