Protecting the Ingroup: Motivated Allocation of Cognitive Resources in the Presence of Threatening Ingroup Members Alastair Coull,* Vincent Y. Yzerbyt, Emanuele Castano, Maria- Paola Paladino,** and Vincent Leemans Catholic University of Louvain at Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium *also at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research **also University of Trento, Italy Research on the Black Sheep effect (Marques, Yzerbyt, & Leyens, 1988) suggests that motivational factors such as the level of identification with the ingroup influences the way people react against negative ingroup members. The present study tested the idea that people may invest a sizable amount of cognitive resources to protect their view of the ingroup when it is challenged by a negative target. We measured the identification of our participants, all students in psychology, with the larger group of psychologists and presented them with descriptions of four ingroup members, three positive and one negative. As expected, high identifiers gave a harsher judgment of the negative target than did low identifiers. In addition, participants’ performance on a secondary task confirmed that high identifiers devoted more resources than low identifiers to process the information about the negative member as compared to a positive ingroup member. These results stress the relationship between motivation and cognitive resources in general, and the Black Sheep effect and stereotyping in particular. KEYWORDS black sheep effect, motivated stereotyping, social identity, stereotype change, subtyping Grou p Processes & Intergroup Relations 2001 Vol 4(4) 327–339 I N GENERAL , you may not feel very concerned about your national, ethnic or religious membership. This is partly linked to the nature of the surrounding people. If you are living in the midst of Christians, and you are a Christian yourself, you tend to forget about religion. In a less homogeneous social environment, however, G P I R Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) [1368-4302(200110)4:4; 327–339; 019176] Author’s note Address correspondence to Vincent Yzerbyt, Catholic University of Louvain at Louvain- la-Neuve, Department of Psychology, Place du Cardinal Mercier 10, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium [email: vincent.yzerbyt@psp.ucl.ac.be]