Abstract

The present study was to investigate the impacts of cognitive bias due to perceptual salience and motivational bias by group membership on individual's group information processing. In addition, it was studied whether the impacts of cognitive bias and motivational bias were affected by two inference processes, memory-based inference process and on-line inference process. In order to manipulate the group memership, two groups (KyungsangDo group vs ChunraDo group) were selected and subjects were sampled according to the growth area. The result found the moderate effect of cognitive bias and motivational bias on individual's group information processing. That is to say, in memory-based inference process, the illusory correlation based on overestimation of co-occurrence of distinctive events was found by the subjects who were in majority group and was not by the subjects in minority group. In on-line inference process, the subjects that were in majority or minority group showed the overestimation of favorable information and the underestimation of unfavorable information about their own group. It means that motivational bias due to group membership affected on informational processing. The result of study suggest that both the cognitive bias due to perceptual salience and the motivational bias by group membership has an influence on individual's group information processing.