The good, the bad, and the manly: Threats to one's prototypicality and evaluations of fellow in-group members

If highly identified group members evaluate in-group members, including the self, according to how well they fit the group's prototype, then they should be threatened when told that they are nonprototypical of the in-group. We propose that this threat will encourage high identifiers to increase their use of prototypicality as a standard for evaluating in-group members. Using men as the in-group, we found that group identification and level of prototypicality feedback interacted to affect intra.-roup evaluations. When highly identified men received feedback that they were low in prototypicality as men, they felt more threatened and showed greater differentiation in their liking for prototypical men over nonprototypical men compared to when they received high prototypicality feedback. In contrast, prototypicality feedback did not influence feelings of threat among low identifiers, nor did it interact with target prototypicality to affect liking of the targets. (C) 2001 Academic Press.