Ingroup bias: how is it formed and what does it consist of?

According to social psychology, People create categorizations and divide other people according to these categories.. In other words, we create groups that can be national, ethnic, religious, gender, preferences, work, etc. This implies that some people will be in our group while others will not, which will give rise to ingroup bias.

Ingroup bias, also called ingroup favoritism, can be defined as the tendency, on the part of members of a group, to favor, benefit, or value the members of their group more highly. This is, people in the own group will benefit more compared to those outside the group.

Ingroup bias in conflict

Ingroup bias arises from the study of relationships between different groups and conflicts. This bias is considered a product of conflict between groups, caused in turn by different interests between groups or having incompatible goals. Two groups can have the same objective, but the fact that one achieves it implies that the other will not be able to achieve it.

We find an example in football. Soccer fans identify with their team, so they create a category that includes fans of their team, but excludes fans of other teams. On the other hand, in the soccer league, the goal is to get the championship or win the league. But only one team can win. Therefore, if my group is from Real Madrid, we are going to have a conflict with the fans of the other teams, especially if they pose a threat because we perceive that they have more opportunities than our team to win the league.

The intensity of the conflict may be greater or less. This will depend on our involvement with our group and other factors. But, in relation to ingroup bias, What is going to change is going to be our attitudes, perceptions, preferences and even behaviors.. For example, we are going to see people from other teams as more unfriendly and with worse taste, which will lead us to treat them worse, while at the same time we treat the fans on our team better.

Advances in the study of ingroup bias

Later research reflected that it was not necessary for competing interests or conflicts to exist for ingroup bias to appear. Simply, Due to belonging to another group, its members were despised. Although members of other groups will not always be despised, what always appears is in-group favoritism. We are going to favor our group both in the distribution of rewards and in the assignment of traits or the assessment of their performance.

These new research have also found an explanation for ingroup bias. Starting from the fact that people are motivated to achieve or maintain a positive concept and image of themselves, we find that people are defined, in part, by their groups of belonging. Thus, If a person wants to get a good image, they have to make the images of their groups also positive.so people will also be motivated to positively evaluate the groups to which they belong.

How do you arrive at a positive evaluation of your own group?

The evaluations made of the groups are made by comparison. We do not say that our group is good, but that it is better than another or the best of all. In this way, when we win when comparing our group with others, we will obtain a positive evaluation and our self-esteem will increase. The conclusion is that we are going to try to make our group different, to be better than the others. Which is called positive ingroup distinctiveness.

On the other hand, for ingroup bias to occur and our perceptions, evaluations and behaviors to change, as a consequence of the search for positive group distinctiveness, four conditions must be met:

People must identify with their group and use it to define the image they have of themselves.Comparison with other groups should be made based on a characteristic of the group that is considered important.The group with which it is established the comparison must be perceived as an important group.The actual positions of the compared groups must be subject to some ambiguity.

Anyway, Belonging to a group has consequences that we are not always aware of. Favoring those we consider members of our group more than members of other groups is one of them. Therefore, knowing these effects of group identification is the first step to managing its impact on us.

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