When Belief Sharing is Questioned: Impact of Low Consensus Information on Judgments About Social Groups

Miroslaw Kofta, Wladyslaw Narkiewicz-Jodko, & Dorota Szelag
Center for Research on Prejudice, Psychology Faculty
Warsaw University, Poland

Perception of belief as shared results in consensual validation (a belief’s experiential status moves from a "subjective feeling" to a “true, objective statement about reality”). Hence, questioning belief’ consensuality should undermine the belief and decrease its impact on social judgment. We hypothesize that this theory holds to the extent that belief is relatively weak, uninvolving, and not central to person’s group identity. When the opposite is true, questioning its consensuality is expected to produce the opposite (paradoxical) effects. Why? In the latter case, low consensus information presumably threatens the conception of the self as a "good” (prototypical) member of the group resulting in activation of whatever strong beliefs accessed by the person in a given moment. We examined how informing participants that their stereotypes are not shared in the group affects social judgment. It appeared that, when judgments were relatively uninvolving and unrelated to participants’ social identity, this treatment weakened stereotypical beliefs on explicit and implicit levels and undermined confidence in their validity (classical effect). However, when we moved to strong stereotypical beliefs (males’ conservative expectations about women’ social roles), the pattern changed substantially. Under group identity primed, low consensus information increased an impact of stereotypical beliefs on judgment (paradoxical effect). Of interest, under personal identity primed, this effect was replaced by the classical effect. This pattern shows that paradoxical increase of a belief strength after the low consensus message is, indeed, specifically related to social identity. In conclusion, questioning belief sharing may produce opposite effects on a momentary intensity of social beliefs. When low consensus information is processed in the cold manner, belief weakening is to be expected. However, when low consensus information is processed in the hot manner (as inconsistent with belief strong and relevant to person’s group identity), belief strengthening seems more likely.