Blank, Hartmut. 1997. "Cooperative Participants Discriminate (Not Always): A Logic of Conversation Approach to the Minimal Group Paradigm." Current Research in Social Psychology 2(5).

Abstract

"The basic finding in minimal group studies is that merely categorizing people into groups leads them to discriminate against the outgroup and favor their own group on a subsequent resource allocation task. Based on Grice's (1975) logic of conversation, it is argued that participants use this group membership information for discrimination because they obey the cooperative principle and assume that the presented group membership information must be relevant for the allocation task. In a variation of the standard design, the group membership information was made explicitly relevant for a second task (without denying its relevance for the allocation task). Consistent with the logic of conversation approach, discrimination was strongly reduced in this condition, compared to the standard design."