Methods for recognizing group affiliations using mobile devices have been proposed using centralized instances to aggregate and evaluate data. However centralized systems do not scale well and fail when the network is congested. We present a method for distributed, peer-to-peer (P2P) recognition of group affiliations in multi-group environments, using the divergence of mobile phone sensor data distributions as an indicator of similarity. The method assesses pairwise similarity between individuals using model parameters instead of sensor observations, and then interprets that information in a distributed manner. An experiment was conducted with 10 individuals in different group configurations to compare P2P and conventional centralized approaches. Although the output of the proposed method fluctuates, we can still correctly detect 93% of group affiliations by applying a filter. We foresee applications in mobile social networking, life logging, smart environments, crowd situations and possibly crowd emergencies.