Intergroup attitudes accessibility and motor approach-avoidance responses in white and black individuals in Portugal

Preference for one’s own group is a widespread phenomenon. Results with dominant and minority group participants, however, are not consistent about whether the ingroup is always implicitly favored. The majority of these findings is related mostly to the Northern-American context. Also, these findings are from studies that relied on a single implicit assessment. We compared Black and White participants in Portugal on their spontaneous reactions using two types of implicit measures: A semantic priming paradigm and an automatic approach/avoidance task. Results showed immediate outgroup-avoidance and ingroup-approach responses for dominant and minority participants, respectively. Moreover, both dominant and minority participants associated their ingroup with positive characteristics, more so than the outgroup. Results are discussed within the theoretical frame of Social Identity Theory and System Justification Theory.