Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. "In-group or out-group extremity: Importance of the threatened social identity". ^ El be negre (1931-1936) - La Ciberniz Archived at the Wayback Machine.^ "Red Sheep: How Jessica Mitford found her voice" by Thomas Mallon New Yorker Archived 6 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine.^ The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms."The 'Black Sheep Effect': Extremity of judgments towards ingroup members as a function of group identification". Even situational factors explaining the deviance have an influence whether the black sheep effect occurs. For instance, the higher the identification with the ingroup, and the higher the entitativity of the ingroup, the more the black sheep effect emerges. Consequently, there are several factors which influence the black sheep effect. Limitations Įven though there is wide support for the black sheep effect, the opposite pattern has been found, for example, that White participants judge unqualified Black targets more negatively than comparable White targets (e.g. Khan and Lambert suggested in 1998 that cognitive processes such as assimilation and contrast, which may underline the effect, should be examined. They argue that devaluation of deviant members is an individual response of interpersonal differentiation. In addition, Eidelman and Biernat showed in 2003 that personal identities are also threatened through deviant ingroup members. To protect the positive group image, ingroup members derogate ingroup deviants more harshly than deviants of an outgroup (Marques, Abrams, Páez, & Hogg, 2001). Furthermore, the positive social identity may be threatened by group members who deviate from a relevant group norm. Group members are motivated to sustain a positive and distinctive social identity and, as a consequence, group members emphasize likeable members and evaluate them more positive than outgroup members, bolstering the positive image of their ingroup ( ingroup bias). Explanations īlack Pope and Black Sheep, a sculpture by Mirosław Bałka, 1987Ī prominent explanation of the black sheep effect derives from the social identity approach ( social identity theory and self-categorization theory ). This effect has been shown in various intergroup contexts and under a variety of conditions, and in many experiments manipulating likeability and norm deviance.
These extreme judgements of likeable and unlikeable (i.e., deviant) ingroup members, relatively to comparable outgroup members is called "black sheep effect". The results indicated that favorability is considered highest for likeable ingroup members and lowest for unlikeable ingroup members, with the favorability of unlikeable and likeable outgroup members lying between the two ingroup members. sociable, polite, violent, cold): unlikeable Belgian students, unlikeable North African students, likeable Belgian students, and likeable North African students. In 1988, Marques, Yzerbyt and Leyens conducted an experiment where Belgian students rated the following groups according to trait-descriptors (e.g. The same concept is illustrated in some other languages by the phrase "white crow": for example, belaya vorona ( бе́лая воро́на) in Russian and kalāg-e sefīd ( کلاغ سفید) in Persian. During the Second Spanish Republic a weekly magazine named El Be Negre, meaning 'The Black Sheep', was published in Barcelona. German, French, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Hebrew, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish, Hungarian, Dutch, Afrikaans, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Catalan, Czech, Slovak, Romanian and Polish. The idiom is also found in other languages, e.g. Jessica Mitford described herself as "the red sheep of the family", a communist in a family of aristocratic fascists. In modern usage, the expression has lost some of its negative connotations, though the term is usually given to the member of a group who has certain characteristics or lack thereof deemed undesirable by that group. In 18th and 19th century England, the black color of the sheep was seen as the mark of the devil. Black wool was considered commercially undesirable because it could not be dyed. The term originated from the occasional black sheep which are born into a flock of white sheep. In most white sheep breeds, only a few white sheep are heterozygous for black, so black lambs are usually much rarer than this. A black fleece is caused by a recessive gene, so if a white ram and a white ewe are each heterozygous for black, about one in four of their lambs will be black. In most sheep, a white fleece is not caused by albinism but by a common dominant gene that switches color production off, thus obscuring any other color that may be present. ( September 2019) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)
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