Culture and Resource Conflict: Why Meanings Matter

Chapter Ten. Intra- and Intergroup Perception of Goals and Values

Chapter Ten Intra- and Intergroup Perception of Goals and Values “One time I caught an eight-pound smallmouth bass. A guy I know asked me if I was going to get it mounted. I said to him, `If your wife died would you put her head up on the wall?’” —A Menominee fisherman THE STUDIES DESCRIBED in chapter 9 established the existence of substantial agreement between our two groups, and some second-order differences . Majority-culture fishermen were slightly more approving of practicing catch-and-release exclusively and reliably more approving both of using fish finders to locate fish and of “pretending to fish for suckers in the spring in hopes of getting a sturgeon on the line.” Menominee fishermen were more approving of fishing for smallmouth or largemouth bass for food, spearfishing walleyes, and someone with a large family taking more than his limit to feed his family. One important result was that the Menominee men were sharply divided on the question about spearfishing walleyes—about half of them strongly approved of it and half strongly disapproved. These differences seem to reflect the relative priorities of the two groups in fishing for food and fishing for sport. Our next step was to evaluate whether our experts were aware of the group differences in orientation and how accurately they perceived both their own group and the other group—in other words, intra- and intergroup perceptions. Our approach was to ask experts to make predictions for their own and the other group, and then, in a feedback part of our 108 Intra- and Intergroup Perception 109 study, show experts how their predictions about their own and the other group matched with the actual data. The goal of feedback was to clarify the assumptions, and mental models, and associated values of each group regarding the other group. There is fairly good evidence that people tend to perceive the views of both their in-group and of out-groups as more extreme than they actually are. A study of own-group perception (Prentice and Miller 1993) found that college students systematically overestimated the amount and perceived desirability of alcohol consumption among other students (their own group) and that, for male students, this misperception led to an increase in drinking. Thus, misperception of a group norm can cause a self-fulfilling prophecy that feeds back to make the perceived group norm even more extreme. This has obvious implications for negotiation and conflict resolution (see Ross and Stillinger 1991; Thompson and Gonzalez 1997). Our focus, however, was the perception of other groups. There is lots of evidence that people tend to negatively stereotype outgroups (see Eagly and Chaiken 1993). Given the tendency to assume more exaggerated stances in both one’s own and other groups, one might expect members of both groups to see majority-culture fishermen as more sport-oriented than they truly are and Menominees as more food-oriented than they are. We also strongly expected that majority-culture fishermen would think that Menominee experts endorse spearfishing walleyes more than they actually do.1 In fact, we thought that this was going to be our big finding, but we were wrong. INTRA- AND INTERGROUP PERCEPTION STUDY The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between the actual similarities and differences noted in chapter 9 and the perceived withinand between-group similarities and differences. In this task we asked the same questions as before, but instead of exploring each informant’s own goals and values we asked each one to report how he thought equally expert members of his group and the other group would answer the probes concerning values, goals, and attitudes. The informants were fourteen majority-culture and fourteen Menominee fish experts, virtually all of whom had participated in the prior study. The time that elapsed between the earlier study and this one was a minimum of several weeks and in some cases several months, so it is unlikely that informants remembered their judgments from before. The average age, education, and years spent fishing was similar in the two groups. We used the same species-ranking, goal-ranking, and practices- 110 Culture and Resource Conflict Table 10.1 Predicted Fish-Value Rankings Own- and Other-Group Raters Menominee Majority Culture Majority Majority Rated Menominee Culture Menominee Culture Sturgeon 9.6 8.7 5.4 10.9 Black sucker 11.9 11.7 11.5 11.9 Bullhead 10...