Past research has already considered how social values may affect inter-group decision making (Van Avermaet & McClintock, 1988; Rabbie, Schotm & Visser, 1989; Platow, McClintock & Liebrand, 1990). Within the context of the minimal group paradigm it has been observed that competitive and selfish people tend to maximize ingroup gain over fairness in their inter-group allocations, while prosocial oriented people are expected to prefer fair gains over intergroup biased allocations (Platow et al., 1990). However, basing on this literature, it is unclear whether people will maintain their preference over allocation of resources even after having discovered the presence of a cheater inside the group. Furthermore, the reaction to rule-breaking behaviors may also affect people¿s attitude over egalitarianism and belief in a just world (i.e., people who believes in a just world would reserve harsher treatment to the cheater). Thus, we are also interested in investigating whether reactions to ingroup (vs. outgroup) cheater are affected not only by preexisting social values, but also whether the relationship between deviant derogation and pro-self allocations is moderated by people¿s attitude over egalitarianism and belief in a just world.
The present research aims at investigating the impact of Social Dominance Orientation on resource allocations in intergroup processes. Specifically, we investigate whether and how different levels of SDO may impact pro-self resource allocation in presence of an ingroup deviant member. We expect that SDO may moderates the relationship between cheater derogation and pro-self choices in distributing resource among minimal groups. Thus, when participants are characterized by high (vs. low) levels of SDO, they are counter-intuitively expected to reduce their selfish choices. Indeed, previous research has shown that competitive and selfish people tend to maximize ingroup gain over fairness in their intergroup resource allocations (Platow et al., 1990). These results highlighted how a pro-self values orientation may affect intergroup decision making within contexts of minimal groups. Consistently, Duckitt and Fisher (2003) argued that pro-self individuals tend to see the world as a place where the strongest will survive and will dominate the weakest. This perfectly fits with the idea that social groups are organized in hierarchies, which was proposed by Sidanius and colleagues (1996). High SDO favors the raise of the individual¿s tendencies to increase or maintain social differences between groups (Pratto et al., 1994) and to show fairness and loyalty to the ingroup (Graham et al., 2009).
Overall, these findings shed light on the individuals¿ general tendency to display ingroup favoritism. However, there is a lack in literature about the circumstances in which such tendency may be attenuated. More in details, previous research has not yet investigated if people may keep stable their ingroup preferences in front of deviant ingroup members. The role of SDO in deviant ingroup processes appear to be an understudied area of social psychology. It could be interesting to investigate whether people maintain their preference about resources allocation even after having discovered the presence of a cheater inside their group. The examination of the interactive roles of the SDO and SVO on the relationship between the derogation of ingroup deviant members and intergroup resources allocation may therefore represents an advance of the current literature. We believe that by establishing if people high (vs. low) in SDO are inclined to judge harsher the ingroup deviant behavior (i.e., Study 1) and if and how they modify their resources allocation after the emergence of a ingroup deviant behavior (i.e., Study 2), may add to the literature on ingroup favoritism and inter-group relations.