Intergroup Bias

Abstract

This chapter reviews the extensive literature on bias in favor of in-groups at the expense of out-groups. We focus on five issues and identify areas for future research: (a) measurement and conceptual issues (especially in-group favoritism vs. out-group derogation, and explicit vs. implicit measures of bias); (b) modern theories of bias highlighting motivational explanations (social identity, optimal distinctiveness, uncertainty reduction, social dominance, terror management); (c) key moderators of bias, especially those that exacerbate bias (identification, group size, status and power, threat, positive-negative asymmetry, personality and individual differences); (d) reduction of bias (individual vs. intergroup approaches, especially models of social categorization); and (e) the link between intergroup bias and more corrosive forms of social hostility.

The mentalizing network orchestrates the impact of parochial altruism on social norm enforcement

“…Parochial altruism constitutes a persuasive psychological phenomenon which is qualified by a preference for altruistic behavior towards the members of one's ethnic, racial, or any other social group, combined with a tendency for indifference, mistrust, or even hostility toward outgroup members [Brewer, 1999;Hewstone et al, 2002]. For example, a recent third-party punishment experiment in Papua New Guinea revealed strong favoritism toward a subject's own linguistic group in giving to others, and significantly greater punishment of individuals from another linguistic group (in comparison to those from the subject's own group) who committed a norm violation toward the subject's ingroup members [Bernhard et al, 2006].…”

Identidad nacional y su relación con la dominancia social y la tolerancia a la transgresión en residentes de Buenos Aires (Argentina)

“…Esta aproximación reporta los niveles de identificación y valoración de las personas con respecto a sus grupos nacionales (c.f., Beramendi & Zubieta, 2013;Espinosa, 2011; Espi nosa & Tapia, 2011; Laca, Mejía & Yáñez, 2010;Pérez de León, 2007). Se ha observado que la identificación nacional cons truye grupos más sólidos y unidos por aparentes lazos comunes (Rottenbacher, 2008), perciben una mayor autoestima colectiva que se con creta en sentimientos de orgullo (Hewstone, Rubin & Willis, 2002) y se asocia con autoestereotipos que aluden a la autoeficacia (Vignoles & Moncaster, 2007; Vignoles, Re galia, Manzi, Golledge & Scabini, 2006), o a otros atributos socialmente valorados como la sociabilidad, simpatía y calidez (Espinosa, 2011). …”

Not on my team: Medial prefrontal cortex responses to ingroup fusion and unfair monetary divisions

“…Although it is not possible to determine this from the present experiment, our findings raise two possibilities: one is that invoking group membership decreases the salience of the offers from noningroup members, and thus inhibits the signaling of fairness in these regions. Second is that in classical experiments contact with the other players ‐ or even simply knowledge that other individuals are part of the experiment ‐ forms a minimal group (Hewstone, Rubin, & Willis, 2002) and leads to the observed pattern of activity. Future work will need to test such possibilities behaviorally and examine whether they can be used to better understand MPFC responses in the UG.…”

“…This raises the possibility that the processing of (un)fairness is influenced by expectations or beliefs about others given their group membership. This follows decades of research showing that people have favorable in‐group attitudes and unfavorable out‐group attitudes, even when group categorizations are only minimally emphasized (Hewstone et al., 2002). Our study extends these findings by showing that these biases can have a significant effect on the response of the mPFC to others’ behaviors (Aoki et al., 2014; Cikara & Van Bavel, 2014; Izuma, 2013), and moreover, in the VMPFC this response is dependent on the degree to which the individual is fused to the ingroup.…”