Caroline Kamau

Who they are

Caroline Kamau was listed in the Department of Organizational Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, when her paper appeared in the International Journal of Psychology (first published online in 2012, in volume 48, issue 3, in 2013). It replicated Aronson and Mills (1959) with 70 participants, who underwent a severe or a mild initiation. About half then received an extrinsic reward for completing the task, which varied the level of dissonance. A severe initiation did not produce more group identity than a mild one, so the original finding was not replicated. Participants who received a reward reported higher group identity than those who did not. Unexpectedly, a mild initiation followed by a reward produced more identity than a severe initiation followed by a reward, and the reward made no difference when the initiation was severe. Her conclusion, in the abstract, is that future research should look at how new members weigh the severity of admission in the cost-benefit calculation that precedes identifying with a group.

A commentary in The Psychologist argues that the initiation task, mathematical subtraction, was not representative of real initiations. That is the commentary's judgement and not the paper's. Only this paper has been read, from its abstract and bibliographic record, so the page covers no other work.

Key papers

Kamau, C. (2013). 'What does being initiated severely into a group do? The role of rewards.' International Journal of Psychology, 48(3), 399-406. doi:10.1080/00207594.2012.663957.

Key ideas

The paper is one of two pieces of evidence on this site that did not support the claim that a harsher initiation buys more liking, the other being the 1997 field test. It also introduces rewards into the design, which none of the earlier studies did. The concept page for Effort Justification places it in the wider record.

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