Mere membership

Abstract

Human social groups are central to social organization and pervasively impact interpersonal interactions. While immensely varied, all social groups can also be considered specific instantiations of a common and abstract ingroup-outgroup structure. How much of the power of human social groups stems from learned variation versus abstract commonality? I review evidence demonstrating that from early in development a wide range of intergroup phenomena, most prominently many ingroup biases, follow solely from simple membership in an abstract social collective. Such effects cannot be attributed to rich social learning and so: a) constrain theories seeking to explain or intervene on ingroup bias, and b) provide reason to think that our species is powerfully predisposed towards ingroup favoritism from early in development.

Turkers of the World Unite: Multilevel In-Group Bias Among Crowdworkers on Amazon Mechanical Turk

“…In addition to the familiar social identities springing up around culturally salient social groups such as ethnicity and nationality, humans are predisposed to attach themselves to newly encountered an otherwise meaningless groups, including groups based on unfamiliar properties such as over-or underestimating dot arrays (Tajfel, 1970) or even groups that are randomly assigned (Billig & Tajfel, 1973). This favoritism occurs along many dimensions and goes far beyond explicit judgments, in that membership in such groups can also affect more subtle implicit attitudes as well as a wide range of behavioral outcomes, including those associated with cooperation and generosity (for a recent review, see Dunham, 2018). What's more, these forms of in-group favoritism can occur even outside an explicit intergroup context, apparently engendered by the mere sense that one is collaborating with or otherwise aligned with others (L. Gaertner, Iuzzini, Witt, & Oriña, 2006).…”

“…For example, it is widely observed with respect to salient real-world social groupings such as ethnicity (Whitt & Wilson, 2007), religiosity (Tan & Vogel, 2008), and political affiliation (Rand et al, 2009). Critically, however, in-group bias also readily emerges based on trivial real-world social groupings (e.g., caused by Pokémon Go teams; Peysakhovich & Rand, 2017) and can be artificially constructed in the laboratory (Brewer, 1979;Dunham, 2018), including when group assignments are explicitly random (Diehl, 1990;Dunham, 2013). Given that in-group bias can emerge under such minimal conditions, it seems plausible that it might occur between workers on the same crowdworker platform or even between anyone who identifies-even in a minimal way-as a crowdworker.…”

Toddlers and infants expect individuals to refrain from helping an ingroup victim’s aggressor

“…In a seminal report, Bernhard et al (34) concluded, "We found that punishers protect ingroup victimswho suffer from a norm violation-much more than they do outgroup victims, regardless of the norm violator's group affiliation." Building on these results, we used minimal-group manipulations (6,39,40) to vary the group memberships of the wrongdoer and the victim relative to that of the bystander, and we examined whether children (i) would expect the bystander to engage in TPP when the wrongdoer's transgression was directed at an ingroup victim, irrespective of the wrongdoer's group membership, but (ii) would expect no TPP when the transgression was directed at an outgroup victim.…”

Sudden shifts in social identity swiftly shape implicit evaluation

“…It seems possible that this might allow for greater generalization since group preferences extend beyond individuals and can impact judgments and behaviors towards brand new individuals. Moreover, the minimal group approach captures a psychological process that is at the root of many intergroup preferences (see Dunham, 2018).…”