ABSTRACT
The history of social psychology would have been less interesting in many ways without the heated debate between social identity and interdependence researchers concerning the primacy of each approach in explaining intergroup differentiation in the minimal group paradigm. Why do people who have been assigned to initially meaningless categories allocate more rewards to members of their own than to members of the other category? This question, so many years later, still provides food for debate (e.g., Gaertner & Insko, 2000; Scheepers, Spears, Doosje, & Manstead, 2002; K. Stroebe, Lodewijkx, & Spears, 2005). The interdependence approach argues that discrimination is the result of realistic conflicts, and perceptions of outcome dependence on ingroup and outgroup members, which trigger a tendency, among others, to reciprocate allocations that are expected from other ingroup (or outgroup) members (Rabbie, Schot, & Visser, 1989; Yamagishi, Jin, & Kiyonari, 1999). Social identity theory, on the other hand, proposes that discrimination is the result of attempting to achieve a positive social identity, or positive distinctiveness for the own group (Leonardelli & Brewer, 2001; Spears, Jetten, & Scheepers, 2002; Tajfel, Flament, Billig, & Bundy, 1971). But to what extent are these approaches distinct from each other and what do they share in their explanation of intergroup discrimination in the minimal group paradigm (MGP)?
