Framed and misfortuned: identity salience and the whiff of scandal

Abstract

In this study a questionnaire was administered via e-mail to Dutch social psychologists. We asked to what extent respondents felt that a widely published plagiarism scandal involving a Dutch psychologist affected themselves and the image of their profession. As predicted, findings indicate that the impact of the scandal was dependent on the salient identity of both the perceiver (‘social psychologist’ or ‘psychologist’) and the stimulus target (‘clinical psychologist’ or ‘psychologist’). Respondents were more affected by the plagiarism scandal when the self-category that was made salient matched the category of the target of the scandal. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.