Social & Critical Psychology · Simplified
Ahead, or Better Off
You are about to be able to choose between the two, and they are not the same choice.
A caution before you start
The categories here are invented and empty. That is the design: it is what lets the paradigm ask whether being sorted into a category is on its own enough to produce differential allocation. It is also the reason the result cannot simply be lifted out of the laboratory. Real groups have histories, unequal starting positions, material interests and things that have actually been done to them, none of which is present when the categories are Kestrels and Wrens. Nothing you choose is saved, nothing is measured about you, and there is no score.
Step 1 of 3
First, a prediction
People are sorted into two categories on the basis of something trivial. Each person then allocates points between two other people, one from each category, who are anonymous. Nobody can allocate anything to themselves, and the points buy nothing. What do most people do?
Step 2 of 3
Four allocations
Each allocation gives points to two anonymous people: one Kestrel and one Wren, neither of whom is you. You cannot allocate anything to yourself, you will never meet either of them, and the points buy nothing at all.
Key terms
- Minimal group
- A category with no history, no contact, no shared interest and no content. If differential allocation appears here, categorisation alone was enough to produce it.
- Maximum ingroup profit
- The option that gives your own category the most points it can get.
- Maximum difference
- The option that puts your own category furthest ahead of the other. It always gives your category fewer points than maximum ingroup profit does.
Step 3 of 3
The same choices, three starting positions
Your four choices are fixed from here. What changes is only where the two categories stood before you allocated anything.
| Starting position | Kestrels before | Wrens before | Kestrels after | Wrens after | What your allocations did |
|---|
What this shows
Being ahead is not the same as being better off
Key idea: In every one of the four allocations there was an option that gave Kestrels more points than the maximum-difference option did. Choosing maximum difference is therefore not a way of getting more; it is a way of being further ahead, and it costs your own category real points to achieve. That is the finding the paradigm exists to produce, and it is the reason a self-interest explanation does not reach it: nobody can allocate to themselves, the points buy nothing, and the allocator will never meet either recipient. What an allocation pattern cannot do is say why. Positive distinctiveness is one account and it is not the only one, and a pattern of choices is compatible with several. The last table is the part to take away. The same four choices create an inequality from a level start and widen an existing one from an unequal start, and nothing in the allocation itself knows the difference.
This is a demonstration of a paradigm rather than a replication, and nothing here reproduces the matrices, procedure or data of any published study. Two things the paradigm itself cannot settle. It shows that categorisation alone is sufficient to produce differential allocation in this setting; it does not show that categorisation is what produces intergroup behaviour outside it, and the ordinary experience of most conflicts involves histories, resources and harms that this design removes on purpose. And it does not establish the explanation. Positive distinctiveness, demand characteristics, a norm of playing the game as it appears to be set up, and simple category salience have all been offered, and choices between four options cannot distinguish them. The third row of the last table is here to make the absence of history visible rather than to fix it.
The longer version adds more allocations, a sorting task before the allocations begin, and an exercise in judging what a set of published claims about the paradigm can and cannot support. It is at Minimal Group and Positive Distinctiveness in the main collection.