Black Sheep Effect

Social Identity and Ingroup Favoritism

Explanation of the black sheep effect draws on social identity theory and self-categorization theory. One basic assumption of these theories is that, with few exceptions, when group membership is salient (when it is the psychological basis of information processing, selfconception, and behavior), people engage in ingroup-serving perceptual and judgmental biases and hold partisan intergroup attitudes. This ingroup favoritism generates ethnocentrism and leads people to prefer ingroup members and features to outgroup members and features. It is not surprising, then, that people evaluate ingroup members in general, and socially desirable ingroup members in particular, more favorably than similar outgroup members.

From this, one might suppose that overall one would favor a socially desirable or undesirable ingroup member over a socially desirable or undesirable outgroup member; after all, ingroup members should be favored over outgroup members. This is where the black sheep effect is counterintuitive and in conflict with social identity theory—as indicated above, socially undesirable ingroup members are disliked more than socially undesirable outgroup members.

Proponents of the black sheep effect believe that this conflict is only apparent. They argue that socially desirable ingroup members support the ingroup's overall positive image and thus attract positive reactions from other members of the group, whereas socially undesirable ingroup members undermine such an image and thus attract negative reactions. Rather than being in contradiction to the social identity framework, the black sheep effect corresponds to a more sophisticated form of ingroup favoritism. By derogating unlikable ingroup members, people are protecting, and thus promoting, the positive image of the ingroup as a whole.

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