The rival doesn’t catch my eyes: In-group relevance modulates inhibitory control over anti-saccades

ABSTRACT

We examined the effects of in-group relevance on inhibitory control in anti-saccades. In Experiment 1, following a central coloured cue, football fans were instructed to look at the target on pro-saccade trials or its mirrored position on anti-saccade trials. The targets were badges of participants’ favourite football team (in-group), its closest rival, or a non-local neutral team. Our results revealed no significant differences on pro-saccade trials for in- versus out-groups. However, on anti-saccade trials participants made more directional errors for the in-group badge compared to the badges of the neutral and rival teams. Moreover, the percentage of directional errors to in-group stimuli on anti-saccade trials was positively correlated with satisfaction toward the participant’s own team. Experiment 2, with separate blocks of pro- and anti-saccade and simple stimuli replicated the results of Experiment 1. Experiment 3, was conducted to test the effects of familiarity on the performance in pro- and anti-saccade tasks using items with no group relevance. Our results revealed that familiarity of the items with no group relevance did not modulate inhibitory control in anti-saccade trials. Further, Experiment 4 showed that for participants who did not have any interest in football the performance in anti-saccades did not differ for different football teams. Overall, our findings suggest that under conditions of real-world intergroup rivalry in-group relevance modulates inhibitory control over anti-saccades. Future studies should seek to unravel the mechanisms contributing to the effects of group relevance on inhibitory control.

KEYWORDS:

• Pro-saccade
• anti-saccade
• in-group
• rival
• directional error

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Directional errors are responses with a horizontal vector in the wrong direction (e.g., left instead of right).

2. Since control participants did not identify with any of the teams, all the teams were “Neutral” to them.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from the Leverhulme Trust to the third and sixth authors, and by ERC Advanced Investigator award 323833 (PePe) to the fourth author. The work was conducted in partial fulfilment of a PhD by the first author.