Summary: New research finds that preferring an outgroup often reflects positive attitudes toward that outgroup rather than negative feelings about one’s own group.
Source: UCR
More than seven decades ago, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark asked Black children to choose between dolls that differed only in skin color. The children overwhelmingly favored the white dolls and assigned them positive traits.
The Clarks interpreted those choices as evidence that Black children experienced internalized inferiority and harmed self-esteem. That interpretation helped shape psychological and legal discussions about race, including evidence cited in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
A large-scale study led by UC Riverside challenges the long-standing assumption that outgroup preference necessarily signals dislike or devaluation of one’s own group. Using implicit bias measures, the team analyzed responses from more than 879,000 participants to investigate whether outgroup favoring stems from negative ingroup evaluations or from positive outgroup evaluations.
“Our findings suggest that outgroup preference does not automatically mean people feel negatively about their own group; often it reflects stronger positive evaluations of the outgroup,” said Jimmy Calanchini, assistant professor of psychology at UC Riverside and lead author of the study.
The new research focused on implicit bias, which captures automatic associations people hold but may not explicitly endorse. To measure those underlying associations the researchers used the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a computerized task that times how quickly participants link words and images representing groups (ingroup vs. outgroup) with positive or negative concepts.
Participants responded faster and more accurately when certain pairings matched their automatic associations; for example, quicker responses to “outgroup + good” pairings indicate stronger positive associations with the outgroup. The study collected IAT data online from volunteer participants and from undergraduates at the University of California, Davis.
The researchers examined intergroup bias across three social domains often studied in prejudice research: race (Black, white, Asian), sexual orientation (straight vs. gay), and age (young vs. old). They applied process-modeling techniques to estimate separately how much positive outgroup evaluation and negative ingroup evaluation contributed to any observed outgroup preference.
Across more than 879,000 IATs, a clear pattern emerged for members of lower-status or minority groups (Asian, Black, gay and lesbian, and older adults). When these participants showed an implicit preference for higher-status outgroups, that bias most often reflected relatively stronger positive evaluations of the outgroup rather than negative evaluations of their own group.
Similarly, among majority or higher-status groups (white, straight, and younger people) who demonstrated ingroup favoritism, the tendency generally reflected stronger positive evaluations of the ingroup rather than active negativity toward the outgroup.
“Liking a higher-status group does not necessarily come at the expense of lower-status groups,” Calanchini said. Cultural portrayals of high-status groups—in media, politics, and other cultural institutions—may help explain why positive outgroup evaluations arise and persist.
The study did identify an important exception. When white participants or younger participants displayed implicit preference for other racial groups or for older people, those cases were more likely to include negative evaluations of their own ingroups. This suggests the relative contribution of ingroup negativity versus outgroup positivity can vary by group and context.
The research, titled “The Contributions of Positive Outgroup and Negative Ingroup Evaluation to Implicit Bias Favoring Outgroups,” appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Co-authors are Kathleen Schmidt (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale), Jeffrey Sherman (University of California, Davis), and Samuel Klein (University of California, Davis).
About this psychology research news
Author: John Warren
Source: UCR
Contact: John Warren – UCR
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Open access. “The contributions of positive outgroup and negative ingroup evaluation to implicit bias favoring outgroups” by Jimmy Calanchini et al., published in PNAS.
Abstract
The contributions of positive outgroup and negative ingroup evaluation to implicit bias favoring outgroups
People sometimes favor groups to which they do not belong (outgroups) over their own groups (ingroups). Many theories assume that such outgroup favorability mainly reflects negative evaluations of the ingroup. To test this assumption, the authors analyzed over 879,000 IAT responses across four social domains and used process modeling to separate the roles of negative ingroup evaluation and positive outgroup evaluation.
Results showed that for lower-status group members—Asian, Black, gay and lesbian, and older adults—outgroup bias more often reflected positive evaluations of higher-status groups rather than negative self-group evaluations. For higher-status group members—White, straight, and younger people—the pattern was more mixed. The authors replicated these findings using explicit measures of intergroup attitudes and conclude that a positive–negative asymmetry characterizes outgroup bias, especially among lower-status groups.