Individual-Group Discontinuity from the Differing Perspectives of Campbell's Realistic Group Conflict Theory and Tajfel and Turner's Social Identity Theory

Two experiments investigated the implications of realistic group conflict theory and social identity theory for explaining the individual-group discontinuity effect. We interpreted realistic group conflict theory as directly implying that individual-group discontinuity is motivated by competition for valued outcomes (max own); we interpreted social identity theory as suggesting that individual-group discontinuity is motivated by relativistic social comparisons (max rel). We developed a new three-choice matrix to differentiate max own from max rel competitiveness