ABSTRACT
While in many domains of psychology a process perspective on motivation has been dominant for a while (i.e., self-regulation; for an overview see Boekaerts, Pintrich, & Zeidner, 2000), intergroup research has for a long time exclusively focused on needs and motives as main constructs of motivation. The current chapter summarizes recent developments towards a selfregulation approach to group processes and intergroup behavior. Prior to discussing this research we summarize studies on the positive-negative asymmetry in social discrimination (see next paragraph for a definition), because this was one of the first fields concerning and applying self-regulation to the group level. Afterwards, self-regulation is defined and a framework for group-based self-regulation research is provided. Then, the research on selfregulation in the intra-and intergroup domain is summarized and differences between individual and group-based self-regulation are analyzed. Finally, the existing evidence is discussed focusing on the question of whether selfregulation can actually be truly group based.
