Abstract
This chapter considers how our understanding of intergroup helping transactions can be enhanced through attending to issues of strategy. First, we examine how ingroup members may help outgroup members as a way to manage and enhance the outgroup’s image of the ingroup. Second, we consider how similar image-related concerns may impact on the decision to seek or refuse help from outgroup members. Third, we consider the strategic construction of social identities and how these might promote helping and help-seeking. In doing so, we not only consider how social identity processes impact upon the proffering and acceptance of help, but we also explore how the discursive characterisation of ‘helping’ may feature in the strategic construction of group relations and social identities. Taken together, these strands highlight two different strategic dimensions to intergroup helping and help-seeking. The first concerns the use of intergroup helping transactions as a means to manage group reputation, while the second concerns the use of such transactions as a way to define group identity. We conclude by considering the implications of these observations for how acts of helping and help-seeking are conceptualised and understood, and how such understandings could be used to promote both behaviours in real-world contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that social identity threat is not to be confused with stereotype threat (e.g., Aronson et al., 1999; Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 1999). While social identity threat refers to concerns regarding the confirmation of stereotypes during social interactions, stereotype threat refers to how ingroup members’ performance on a domain-relevant task can be disrupted due to concerns they will confirm a competence-related stereotype through their behaviour (such as women performing badly on a maths test after the stereotype of women being bad at maths is activated implicitly; Shelton et al., 2006). Stereotype threat is therefore a specific type of social identity threat, and is thus more narrowly defined. Additionally, the primary result of stereotype threat is usually disruptions in task performance due to evaluative concerns. This is unlikely to be an outcome of more general forms of social identity threat, since such situations involve more generic social interaction, rather than evaluation on a domain-relevant task. Indeed, Shelton et al. (2006) suggested that stereotype threat occurs when concerns experienced by participants are imposed by the experimental paradigm, and that these paradigms usually involve participants engaging in competency-related tasks, such as tests or assessments.
- 2.
Consider for example the following example of this genre: ‘What’s the difference between a tightrope and a Scotsman? A tightrope sometimes gives.’
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Wakefield, J.R.H., Hopkins, N. (2017). Help that Helps: Exploring Strategic Motivations in Intergroup Helping Transactions. In: van Leeuwen, E., Zagefka, H. (eds) Intergroup Helping. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53026-0_8
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