A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding What Ingroup Bias is – Its Causes, Impacts, and Examples
Published by at July 4th, 2023 , Revised On August 8, 2024
Have you ever come across people who prefer certain kinds of people or things over others in different situations? Whether it’s a sports match, community discussion, office activity, or anything else, they show favouritism towards specific people. Do you know why they prefer one group over the other? They do so because the ingroup bias influences them unconsciously.
People tend to favour a specific kind of ethnicity, culture, religion, race, social class, etc, over other people or groups.
Before moving on to its causes and examples, let’s first understand what it is and how it affects our lives.
What is Ingroup Bias?
Ingroup bias (also known as in-group favouritism) is the tendency to favour or give preference to people who belong to the same group over other people or groups. This bias occurs even when people are divided into random groups, making group memberships effectively meaningless.
The definition of ingroup bias is “viewing and treating people in one’s group favourably compared to others.” The sense of collective identity among individuals stems from the same identical features among each other.
Fans supporting one club can be referred to as a group irrespective of their social class or political background. That’s because of the cognitive psychological effect that every one of us is identical due to an affiliation to the same place or idea.
What are the Causes of Ingroup Bias?
Let’s discuss some of the top causes to better understand how ingroup bias affects our daily lives.
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Social Categorisation
Ingroup and outgroup biases are natural. Humans automatically classify and divide other people into different groups according to traits like ethnicity, nationality, or affiliation.
This process is known as social categorisation. This classification leads to a bias favouring the ingroup by fostering a sense of identity and belongingness to one’s own group.
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Self-Esteem and Identification
People frequently get a sense of self-worth and identification from their group memberships. Positive judgments of the ingroup can raise people’s self-worth and self-esteem, which results in a favouring bias towards their own group.
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Norms of The Ingroup
People are used to socialising according to their ingroup’s norms, values, and beliefs from a very young age. Respecting these standards encourages ingroup loyalty and harmony, which assist in the emergence of ingroup prejudice. It is the most common cause of ingroup bias.
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Similarity and Comfort
Comfort is an essential factor in establishing groups. Whether in terms of physical characteristics, culture, language, or shared experiences, people tend to feel more at ease with others who are similar to their own standards.
This resemblance and familiarity attract people to work to foster the ingroups either at school or in the office.
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Social Identity Theory
In social identity theory, people try to preserve a positive social identity by positively distinguishing their ingroups from outgroups. This urge to elevate the status and value of one’s group might lead to ingroup bias.
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Competition Between Groups
When there is rivalry or conflict between several groups, people tend to be more devoted to and supportive of their group. Race, nationality, religion, politics, social class, and any other group affiliation are the factors that cause ingroup bias.
Because of the increased rivalry between groups, people may become more inwardly biased because they see other groups as competitors for resources or social prestige.
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Cognitive Processes
Cognitive biases, such as conformity and implicit bias, can influence the perception and evaluation of information related to ingroups and outgroups.
People selectively attend to or interpret information that confirms their positive views of the ingroup and negative views of outgroups, further reinforcing ingroup bias.
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What is the Impact of Ingroup Bias?
Our daily lives can be significantly impacted by ingroup bias, affecting our beliefs, attitudes, behaviours, and interactions with others. Following are some of the most prominent impacts of ingroup bias on our daily lives:
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Discrimination
One of the most prominent impacts of ingroup bias is discrimination. Ingroup bias causes prejudice and discriminatory attitudes toward outgroup members. As a result, people are subjected to unjust treatment, prejudice, and stereotypes based on ethnicity, nationality, religion, or social class.
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Stereotyping
Ingroup prejudice can support and maintain negative stereotypes about people who belong to other groups. These stereotypes are often incorrect generalisations, resulting in partial understanding, unfair treatment of members of different groups, and biased judgements.
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Interpersonal Relationships
Ingroup bias impacts how we establish and preserve connections with others. Multiple experiments have been carried out to check this behaviour.
People who are part of our ingroup may make us feel more at ease and trustworthy, which could lead to possible exclusion or mistrust of people who are part of other groups.
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Societal Solidarity and Conflicts
Ingroup bias can help maintain societal solidarity by creating cohesion and cooperation among communities or group members. However, it can also result in intergroup conflicts, opposition, and discrimination, primarily when rivalry or a sense of threat exists among various groups.
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Lack of Justice in Decision-Making
Ingroup prejudice can impact decision-making processes at the individual or social level. When distributing resources and employment, people unconsciously favour their clan or group, which can result in unfairness and inequality.
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Acceptance of Selective Information
People are likely to accept information that supports their group’s viewpoints or beliefs instead of information that does not resonate with their ideas. This can lead us to accept selective information from media sources that are in accordance with our views, resulting in polarisation.
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Spoils Social Fabric
Our social fabric can be spoiled by ingroup bias, which leads people to discriminate at the workplace, schools, and community events just to favour people from the same group or ethnicity. This bias can spoil everything, from our norms to our culture.
Ingroup Bias Examples
Let’s explore some examples of ingroup bias to understand how it affects our decisions and actions at home or elsewhere, without realising which cognitive bias influences us.
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Same Passion Sharing
People often prefer to socialise with people who have the same passion or interest as them. Sports fans prefer to communicate with people supporting the same team as they do due to a sense of connection based on common interests or passions.
It can help to foster positive feelings towards fellow fans and people supporting the same political party.
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Same Age Group
Individuals try to communicate or socialise with people from the same age group to share a sense of relativeness with each other. It can lead to ingroup bias between people, resulting in excluding others who fall outside the age group.
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Intelligence Bias
We may perceive individuals from our clan or group as more intelligent than others because of shared beliefs or ideas. This can create an illusion of superiority in our minds and limit our ability to learn the diverse perspectives of outgroup members.
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Preferable Treatment
Have you ever experienced the cues in which people allow others to cut in line to favour them? If you carefully observe them, then you will understand why they do so.
They give preferential treatment to others because the people are wearing political slogans of their choice to show a sense of connection and solidarity with others who hold similar views.
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Fraternity Favouritism
It is the most common example, which can be seen in several workplaces where the hiring manager prefers candidates from the same school or ethnic group over others because of this cognitive bias at work.
Sometimes, this leads to overlooking more qualified candidates from other groups and hiring underqualified candidates from the same group in companies.
Ingroup vs. outgroup Bias
Both terms are usually discussed under the umbrella of cognitive biases because of their relativeness to the psychology of humans. Both work to produce psychological effects on humans.
The difference between ingroup and outgroup bias is very minute. Let’s look at the core difference between them below.
| Ingroup Bias | Outgroup Bias |
|---|---|
| It is a form of cognitive bias that influences us to give preference or priority to people in our group over others. These are people with whom we identify or relate ourselves. | It is a form of cognitive bias that influences us to show a negative attitude towards people from other groups or with people whom we do not identify ourselves. |
Frequently Asked Questions
Ingroup bias is the tendency to favour a specific group of people over others simply because of their similarities in beliefs, ideas, ethnicity, religion, culture, and so on.
Ingroup bias is the act of favouring people from the same group, and outgroup bias is the act of showing negative attitudes toward people from other groups based on ethnicity, race, colour, religion, social class, etc.
Ingroup bias in psychology is termed as a cognitive effect that drives people to show favourable attitudes either in school or office or at any place towards people with whom they relate or feel a sense of collective identity.
