How group identification distorts beliefs

Abstract

This paper investigates how group identification distorts people's beliefs about the ability of their peers in social groups. We find that experimentally manipulated identification with a randomly composed group leads to overconfident beliefs about fellow group members' performance on an intelligence test. This result cannot be explained by individual overconfidence, i.e., participants overconfident in their own skill believing that their group performed better because of them, as this was ruled out by experimental design. Moreover, we find that participants with stronger group identification put more weight on positive signals about their group when updating their beliefs. These in-group biases in beliefs can have important economic consequences when group membership is used to make inference about an individual's characteristics as, for instance, in hiring decisions. This paper investigates whether and how identification with a group leads to overconfident beliefs 2 about the ability of other members of that group. Models of ego-utility or self-image protection 3 posit that people systematically inflate ego-relevant beliefs in order to feel good about themselves 4

Prehistoric Perspectives on “Others” and “Strangers”

“…A historical example is the ancient Greek worldview, by which a social universe was divided almost by default into two: "us" (and all related "others"), meaning familiar, Greekspeaking individuals/political entities; and the rest of the world populations, "strangers, " i.e., unfamiliar individuals/political entities that did not speak the language, all of them stereotyped as "Barbarians." In fact, to this day group identity creates cognitive social and economic biases and stereotypes that affect venues of modern life (e.g., Cacault and Grieder, 2019). In this sense, SC constructs that have emerged in deep prehistoric times affect many aspects of our modern lives, in an ongoing process of self-domestication.…”

“…In particular, shifts in group size and intra-and inter-group connectivity are currently considered as significant drivers of cultural transmission and cultural change (e.g., Premo and Scholnick, 2011;Derex et al, 2014Derex et al, , 2018Stout, 2018;Greenbaum et al, 2019). The interactions within-and between-groups are complex processes that are impacted by the social roles of the individuals that comprise those units (Jenkins et al, 2018;Cacault and Grieder, 2019). These encompass the self-recognized place of an individual within her group, which in turn shapes ".…”

Markets Reduce Discrimination

“…Even though minimal groups induced via preferences for paintings are purposefully designed to be meaningless, there is overwhelming evidence that people react to such groups in predictable and economically relevant ways. In particular, membership in such artificial groups leads people to behave more altruistically towards members of the ingroup (Chen and Li, 2009;Paetzel and Sausgruber, 2018;Müller, 2019), changes the degree of pro-socialness as well as the distribution of equity-efficiency trade-offs (Müller, 2019), affects the decision-making process beyond the direct effect on the utility function (Le Coq, Tremewan, and Wagner, 2015), improves coordination (Chen and Chen, 2011), decreases trust towards the outgroup (Hargreaves Heap and Zizzo, 2009), increases competitiveness (Cornaglia, Drouvelis, and Masella, 2019) and distorts beliefs (Cacault and Grieder, 2019). An alternative approach to creating groups would be to rely on natural identities, such as gender or race, potentially via priming.…”

Inequality, role reversal and cooperation in multiple group membership settings

“…Cacault and Grieder ( 2019 ), for example, additionally show that simple manipulations affect beliefs about abilities of in-group members.…”