PONE-D-24-09851How appraisals of an in-group's collective history shape collective identity and action: Evidence in relation to African identityPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Makanju,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jun 20 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Pierre Bouchat

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. Please note that in order to use the direct billing option the corresponding author must be affiliated with the chosen institute. Please either amend your manuscript to change the affiliation or corresponding author, or email us at plosone@plos.org with a request to remove this option.

3. Your ethics statement should only appear in the Methods section of your manuscript. If your ethics statement is written in any section besides the Methods, please move it to the Methods section and delete it from any other section. Please ensure that your ethics statement is included in your manuscript, as the ethics statement entered into the online submission form will not be published alongside your manuscript. 

4. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

Additional Editor Comments:

Dear Authors,

I have received three reviews of the manuscript PONE-D-24-09851 "How appraisals of an in-group's collective history shape collective identity and action: Evidence in relation to African identity". I also read your paper carefully and independently, before looking at the reviews. I want to thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and the three reviewers, each of whom is expert in this area, for their service to the field.

As you'll see from reading the reviewers' comments, we all find the document interesting and worthy of praise. At the same time, the comments contain insightful suggestions on how to improve the manuscript. My own reading of the work leads me to agree with this general assessment. That's why I'd like to suggest that you revise the document before it is finally accepted. It is particularly important to include in your cover letter a detailed explanation of your decisions regarding how you have dealt with these comments.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

********** 

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

********** 

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

********** 

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

********** 

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: It is a very interesting work, with data from a cultural region where there are few studies and from one of the great countries of Africa.

They should review and integrate more articles on social and national identity and collective memory, not only focuse on weird nations,for example those of Rosa Cabecinhas (author cited above) on Lusophone Africa. see also10.18800/psico.201001.005 and see this monograph doi 10.5964/jspp.v5i2.895 and thios one doi.org/10.1111/ajsp.12376

Also the recent ones by JH Liu and colleagues on collective memory.

It is central for a tru open science perespective to review not only mainstream anglophone authors

less i have forwarded to articles on africa, asia and latin america

Manipulation has limited effects and the moderate mediation is not replicatedThe transparency of the authors should be reinforced in my opinion and the article should be published The hypothetical deductive model is a myth and I suggest that the authors better explore their data.

First, since African social identity does not change, it can be used as a dispositional variable.

Previous studies have shown that high social identity leads to minimizing or rejecting negative information - for a relationship between collective culture and national identity see Klein.

Looking for previous studies and relying on them I would contract this effect - I suggest using tertiles because Klein found a curvilinear effect. see doi 10.1111/j.2044-8309.2011.02028.x

Second, I suggest to do a meta-analytic integration of the three studies and provide an estimate of the relationship between identity and valence and the other variables. You can use fixed model and this can be accomplished with excel no nedd of CMA o R

Third, use and aggregate the African collective esteem scale and see if it is identity and collective esteem that predict collective action using multiple regression or SEM.

Of course also you can explore what is specifically related to a positive valence of african past (collective identity or esteem) see 10.1017/S1138741600002456

Fourth, make the scale of collective action more explicit, what is the we (Nigeria, Africa...) what are the claims and what is the enemy of this action.

Minor points are said valance instead of valence

A table is written colact 9 and it is 8

Figures have explanatory paragraphs in bold type and this is a mistake

Reviewer #2: Dear Dr Bouchat,

I have now reviewed the manuscript entitled “How appraisals of an in-group’s collective history shape collective identity and action: Evidence in relation to Africa” and my general thought is that it is an interesting, well-written and well-analysed paper. I do have some minor comments and suggestions, however nothing substantial.

Here are some general comments, mostly in order of appearance.

1. Throughout the text, there are some hard-to-read sentences, often because they are too long. This is already the case with the very first sentence, especially the part “how group members engage with their in-groups in terms of how much they identify with the in-group”.

2. On p. 6, the authors propose a multidimensional approach based on thirteen dimensions, themselves clustered under four superordinate dimensions. This seems like an important conceptual framework that then disappears from the discussion. A discussion about what their factor analysis reveals in relation to their conceptual framework would be worth having. For instance, why did the richness dimension end up loading (after rotation) on the importance factor? Also, I was wondering why they did not use the same items for Study 2A and 2B?

3. On p. 13, the format of the material is not clear. Even though the authors talk about “documentaries”, it could be either written, audio or video documentaries. I would suggest the authors describe the format already in the introduction.

4. In experiment 1, the control condition ends up being a not very good “control”, as it receives the highest scores on all collective historical appraisal dimensions. But more importantly, it is also not different from some of the precolonial history conditions on certain levels (for example it is as positive as the positive precolonial history). Once these manipulation checks revealed this issue, it might have been better to remove it from the analyses and focus on the comparison of interest, which is the two types of precolonial history and their influence on identification and group-based action. Indeed, an ANOVA including the three conditions might not reveal underlying differences between the two historical conditions on the count of this third “in-between” control condition.

5. On p. 23 and 49, the authors compare participants’ scores to the midpoint of their scales. To be honest I do not understand the rationale and do not believe it to be relevant. Is there a theoretical (or an empirical) assumption that the population would be centred on the mean point? If yes, this needs to be discussed before. But in many countries, I would not expect measures of identity to be centred around the midpoint. I would prefer a section on descriptive data at the beginning of each result section describing the scores.

6. On p. 25 (and across study 1 in general), the authors seem to consider their manipulation as a manipulation of the appraisal of subjective importance. However, they proposed similar documentaries, with simply a change in valence. It is not clear to me how this change in valence should also be considered a manipulation of the perceived importance.

7. On p. 31, I would have like the authors to reflect on why the positive history manipulation led to a smaller rating of importance than the negative history manipulation. Furthermore, in the paragraph about the “control” condition (which is not really a “control”), I would have liked to see a discussion about how these results affected their further analyses (not necessary if the authors take on board my suggestion on point 4 and remove the condition for their analyses).

8. For studies 2b, students were enrolled in which course? Psychology?

9. On p. 33, the authors say that they changed their measures of appraisals from semantic differential to attitude statements, but they do not say why. It makes comparisons between studies difficult.

10. On p. 52, the authors propose that one possible reason for the null effects may be the relative weakness of the manipulation of the subjective importance of African history. However, in study 1, there was no manipulation of the importance, and yet they found it moderated the effect of valence. Furthermore, the manipulation did work in both studies 2a and 2b. In other words, no manipulation (study 1) revealed an effect and manipulation (studies 2) revealed no effect. I think this needs to be discussed a bit further.

11. At the beginning of the general discussion on p. 53, the authors indicate finding null effects in experiment 1. I would have liked some reflection as to why this was the case (or at least to do it in the discussion of that study).

Minor details.

- p. 5 valance should be “valence”

- p. 25, first line. The partial eta square should be .016, not .015.

- p. 26-27. The parenthesis “(and not the African Savannah condition)” should be placed earlier in the sentence as it reads as if it the comparison between negative history and Savannah and not positive history and Savannah (there is a similar problem on p. 28).

Reviewer #3: This paper aims at investigating the impact of African history appraisals on Nigerian participants’ social identification and group-based action. It presents three experiments in which versions of Africa’s past were manipulated. One of the strong points of this paper is the use of – rather large – Nigerian samples, given the scarcity of research with African participants. In addition, the research question is original and, in my view, highly relevant. The theoretical intro is appropriate, too. The confirmation (based on a former qualitative study) of a typology of appraisals of history, alone, is an important contribution. Results do not meet all the expectations as studies 2 and 3 failed to replicate the interesting pattern found in Study 1, but these results are presented and discussed in a very honest and transparent manner. Globally, I believe this paper deserves to be published. However, I'd like to highlight a few critical points which, once considered, could make it even better.

- A question that remains open throughout the paper is what exactly was manipulated through these excerpts of videos. They are presented as either positive, negative, or neutral. But the nature of “positive” or negative” should be better explained, in my view. Positive could refer to a dimension of morality, but also of agency, competence, etc. If we refer to Gray & Wegner’s moral typecasting model (2009), it seems that Africa is depicted as agentic and moral in the positive video, whereas it is depicted as a negative moral agent in the negative one? The link with social identification seems relevant since people are probably reluctant to identify with an immoral ingroup, but perhaps less so for collective mobilization because the difference in agency between these two experimental conditions is far from obvious. A comparison between a positive agent and negative patient (i.e. victim) moral typecasts would have made sense. I think the paper would benefit from some more explanations about this, and from a deeper discussion.

- I think it is inappropriate to present measures of historical appraisal as manipulation checks. On the one hand, they seem too remote from the actual manipulations to be presented as such. And if they are used to check whether a manipulation was effective or not, there should be a conclusion about this effectiveness, which is missing. On the other hand, manipulation control measures cannot be used to test hypotheses. Thus, in this paper, valence cannot be presented as a manipulation check and then used as a mediator.

- 25. The decision to use subjective importance as a moderator is justified on the basis that there was no strong effect of the manipulation on this variable. I think a theoretical explanation is also needed.

- 26. As I understand, only one contrast was entered into the analysis (comparing the positive to the other two conditions). I’m not an expert in contrast analyses but I think one should always enter all the contrasts (two contrasts for 3 conditions), either polynomial or Elmert. And it would make more sense to compare the two experimental conditions (linear contrast) and the two experimental conditions to the control condition (quadratic contrast). If there is a justification to do otherwise, it should be better explained.

- The positive correlation between subjective importance and valence should be considered in the interpretations. People who hold negative representations of African history may lower its importance.

- I don’t understand clearly why Studies 2a and 2b were presented as distinct studies since it seems to be the same design, same material used for manipulation, same measures, same kind of population (Nigerian adults), etc. Combining the two samples would increase statistical power and simplify the presentation of results. Alternatively, this choice could be better justified.

- In Discussion, I think the important finding that participants who thought African history was not important seemed to use it to contrast their identity with it deserves some more explanation (it seems less intuitively obvious than the assimilation effect found in the positive condition when history was considered important).

- 55. I found the discussion of non-expected results very honest, cautious and nuanced.

In short, I really enjoyed reading this article and found many aspects to like in it. However, there is some room for improvement. I hope my comments will help the authors in this process. I wish them all the best in pursuing this great line of research!

********** 

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

How appraisals of an in-group's collective history shape collective identity and action: Evidence in relation to African identity

PONE-D-24-09851R1

Dear Dr. Makanju,

Thank you for your responses to the reviewers' comments. After careful reading of these responses and the current version of the manuscript, I find it ready for acceptance in Plos. I believe that your manuscript will make a valuable contribution to our field and thank you for that.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Pierre Bouchat

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE