Investigating the automatic in-group bias toward EU and its role for the development of a European Identity

The European Union (EU) is a relatively recent political institution which, due to the presence of an high heterogeneity among state-members, is constantly crossed by centrifugal tensions, making difficult for European citizens to feel a full EU identity, and making their emergent attitudes and beliefs towards EU uncertain. In this vein, an important research issue may be the spontaneous evaluations of EU which, in line with the recent literature, may be considered as embryonic precursors of successive explicit/reflexive beliefs and attitudes. The present study is aimed at investigating implicit attitudes towards EU administering an adaptation of the Implicit Association Test (EU-IAT) to a sample of 210 EU participants (147 males) aged 38.7 (SD = 15.7), along with the PVQ-21, a scale designed to measure basic values. Results showed: 1) an adequate reliability for the EU-IAT; 2) a positive value for mean IAT scores which is significantly different from zero, indicating that participants associate more strongly EU with good attributes rather than with bad attributes (and Rest of the world with Bad attributes rather than with good attributes); 3) a significant positive correlation of the EU-IAT with conservation values (in particular with conformity) and a significant negative correlation with openness to change values (in particular with self-direction) with a moderate/high effect size. These results provide first evidence for reliability and criterion validity of the EU-IAT, and suggest that EU citizens showed an automatic and emergent bias in favour of EU that is related to conservation values.