Effects of Deterrence on Intensity of Group Identification and Efforts to Protect Group Identity -- Special Issue on Effort

Group identification serves important functions such as motivating group members to work towards group goals and sustaining their efforts to maintain a positive group identity. Thus increasing or decreasing group identification has implications for group members’ commitment to achieving group goals. We propose that pursuit of group-level goals has the same properties as the pursuit of individual goals: both are affected by obstacles to goal achievement. We show that group identification and group-level efforts to protect group identity can be reduced or enhanced by deterrents to feeling identified with the ingroup. We exposed participants to different types of deterrents: a reason for not liking the ingroup (Study 1), difficulty of achieving an ingroup goal (Study 2), and a threat to ingroup identity (Study 3). Group identification and strength of efforts to achieve a group goal increased with the strength of deterrence, to the point where it decreased in the strong deterrent condition. Implications for intergroup motivation are discussed.