Spock's Not One of Us! Exploring the In-Group Overexclusion Effect

Liberal or Conservative?

We all belong to many different social groups. For example, we belong to groups based on our age, gender, nationality, sexuality, and occupation, to name just a few. Most of the time, it's fairly easy to work out who belongs to which group. But sometimes it's not that clear. For example, if you had to guess, would you say that the man opposite is a liberal or a conservative? Well, social psychologists have found that your answer will sometimes depend on which group you belong to. If you're a liberal, then you'll probably guess that the man is a conservative. And if you're a conservative, then you'll probably guess that he's a liberal. This mysterious phenomenon is called the in-group overexclusion effect. 

Human or Vulcan?

Now sit up straight - it's formal definition time: The in-group overexclusion effect is an intergroup effect in which people are more likely to classify ambiguous individuals as members of the out-group (i.e., the group that they don't belong to) than their in-group (i.e., the group that they do belong to). So, to take a slightly less real world example, you’d be more likely to classify the lovely Mr Spock as a Vulcan (i.e., an out-group member) rather than a human (i.e., an in-group member), even though he is half human and half Vulcan. (Apologies if you’re of the Vulcan persuasion by the way. My example only works if you're human!)

Based on social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979), Leyens and Yzerbyt (1992) proposed a motivational explanation for the in-group overexclusion effect: People are motivated to protect their in-group from intrusion (contamination, pollution!) by negatively-valued out-group members in order to protect the positivity of their associated social identity and self-esteem. If those no-good out-group members get classified as in-group members, then they'll sully your group with their negativity and, since part of your self-esteem is derived from belonging to a positive in-group, you're motivated to err on the side of caution and make sure that you exclude anyone from your group who shows even a hint of being an out-group member.

There's some good evidence in support of the social identity part of this explanation: People who identify strongly with their in-group are more likely than those who identify weakly to show the overexclusion effect (Castano, Yzerbyt, Bourguignon, and Seron, 2002). However, to date, there has been no direct evidence for the motivational part of the explanation - the part that relates to the in-group's positivity and your own self-esteem. Do people excluded ambiguous others from their group in order to protect the their group's positivity and their own self-esteem? My colleague, Dr Stefania Paolini, and I aimed to test this motivational part. We made two predictions:

Prediction 1: If the overexclusion effect is caused by the need to protect the in-group’s positivity, then it should only occur when the in-group is positive and the out-group is negative (and not vice versa) because it is only in this situation that group members would be motivated to exclude nasty negative out-group members from their nice positive in-group.

Prediction 2: If the overexclusion effect is caused by the need for self-esteem, then people who have low self-esteem should be most likely to display the effect because they have the greatest need for self-esteem.

To test these predictions, we asked 122 undergraduate students to complete Rosenberg’s (1965) Self-Esteem Scale. This scale includes 10 statements such as "I feel that I have a number of good qualities." Respondents are asked to indicate how much they agree or disagree with each statement.

Next, participants completed a memory recall task in which they were presented with a series of diagrams on a computer screen like the one below. Each diagram showed two groups of people, with each person represented by a code number from 1 to 20. One group was located inside a picture of a bucket of soapy water. The other group was located inside a picture of a dustbin full of rubbish. We asked participants to consider the people in the bucket as "clean" and people in the dustbin as "dirty." So, obviously, the clean group was a positive group and the dirty group was a negative group.

Participants were given an identity number (3 or 14) which they were told identified them, and this code number appeared in one of the two groups. So, one of the groups represented an in-group, and the other represented an out-group. In the diagram above, the dirty group is the in-group because it contains the numbers 3 and 14 (the participants' identity numbers), and the clean group is the out-group. But in other diagrams that we presented, the clean bucket contained the in-group members and the dirty dustbin contained the out-group members.

For each diagram that they viewed, participants were given 5 seconds to memorize which people belonged to which group. The diagram was then removed, a person’s code number was presented, and participants were asked to recall which group the person had belonged to, like this: “Person Number 7. Clean or Dirty?” Our predictions related to those instances in which participants made errors in the memory recall task and assigned a person to the wrong group.

Consistent with previous research, participants erred on the side of caution and misassigned more in-group members to the out-group than they misassigned out-group members to the in-group. In other words, they showed the classic in-group overexclusion effect. However, consistent with Prediction 1, this effect was qualified by whether the group was clean or dirty. The overexclusion effect only occurred when the in-group was clean (i.e., positive) and the out-group was dirty (i.e., negative) – the red line in the diagram below. There was no significant overexclusion effect when the in-group was dirty and the out-group was clean – the green line in the diagram. Hence, consistent with Prediction 1, the overexclusion effect only occurred when the in-group was positive and out-group was negative and not vice versa.

To test Prediction 2, we computed an index that represented the overexclusion effect by subtracting the number of misassignments to the in-group from the number of misassignments to the out-group. Larger positive scores on this index indicated a larger overexclusion effect. Consistent with Prediction 2, participants' scores on the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale negatively predicted the overexclusion effect. Hence, the lower people’s self-esteem, and the greater their need for self-esteem, and the more likely they were to show the overexclusion effect by misassigning people to the out-group rather than the in-group.

Our results provide an important piece in the puzzle of the in-group overexclusion effect - the motivational piece. They tell is that it's not enough to simply identify with your group to show the overexclusion effect - you also have to value your group positively. Admittedly, identification and in-group favouritism often go hand in hand, but there are some cases where they diverge. For example, members of stigmatized, low status, and minority groups might identify with their group but also recognise its inherent negativity.

Interestingly, our research also suggests that people with low self-esteem are the most likely to exclude people from their group. Transporting back to the USS Enterpise, perhaps Dr McCoy ("Bones") had low self-esteem because, as Spock observed, he was always the first to exclude Spock from the human race:

Dr McCoy: “Are you out of your Vulcan mind? No human can tolerate the radiation that's in there!”

Mr Spock: “As you are so fond of observing, doctor, I am not human!”

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

For further information, please see the following journal article:

Rubin, M., & Paolini, S. (2014). Out-group flies in the in-group’s ointment: Evidence of the motivational underpinnings of the in-group overexclusion effect. Social Psychology DOI: 10.1027/1864-9335/a000171

For a self-archived version of this article, please see here.

In-Group Favouritism can be used to Get Even as well as to Get Ahead

Social identity theory is a major mainstream theory of intergroup relations (Tajfel and Turner, 1979). At its heart lies the assumption that social groups fight and compete with one another in order to attain positive distinctiveness from one another. In other words, group members are motivated to favor their own group (the in-group) and derogate other groups (out-groups) along specific intergroup comparison dimensions in order to increase or maintain their group's relative social status. High in-group status and positive in-group distinctiveness enable in-group members to achieve or maintain a positive social identity and concomitant positive self-esteem (Rubin and Hewstone, 1998, 2004). So, for example, sports fans support their team and derogate the other team in the hope that their team will beat the other group so that they can then bask in the reflected glory of their team's success.

Oxford United Fans Celebrating at a 2011 Game

There is a lot of evidence in support of the social identity explanation of in-group favoritism. However, my colleagues (Constantina Badea and Jolanda Jetten) and I have recently questioned whether beating the out-group is the only motive for in-group favoritism. We assumed that, in the specific case of low status groups, in-group favoritism may be used to make the in-group equal to the out-group, and not necessarily better than the out-group. In this case, in-group favoritism is used to achieve intergroup fairness rather than positive in-group distinctiveness. To give a real world example, gay men and women may favor their low status group not because they want to outdo straight men and women but because they seek equality with straight people in having the right to marry their partners. In this case, in-group favoritism is enacted with the aim of achieving intergroup equality rather than high in-group status or positive distinctiveness.

An Equal Love Rally in Melbourne, Australia

To clarify our assumptions, we distinguished between two types of in-group favoritism that might be used by low status groups: competitive favoritism and compensatory favoritism.

1. Low status groups can use competitive favoritism to compete with high status out-groups in order to achieve positive in-group distinctiveness.
2. Low status groups can use compensatory favoritism to compensate for their low status and achieve intergroup fairness.

To test these predictions, we asked 139 psychology undergraduates to take part in a social group resource distribution task. Participants were given an identification number ranging from 1 to 50 and then randomly assigned to two arbitrary groups called the “Red Group” and the “Green Group.” They then allocated points to people from their group and the other group. They were told to think of the points as "points in a game," where the more points a person or group gets, the better. Crucially, the members of one group always started this points allocation task with two more points than the members of the other group. So, in the context of our admittedly artificial laboratory situation, we had an intergroup status hierarchy, with a high status group starting off with more points than a low status group.

Participants used a series of point allocation tables like the one below to award points to group members. In each table, they had to circle one of the four columns listed under the heading “My Allocation to Each Person.” Some of the choices in these columns compensated the low status group member for their initial two-point disadvantage. For example, if a member of the Red Group circled the 3/5 choice in the table, then their fellow low status Red Group member would end up with the same number of points (6 starting points + 5 allocated points = 11 points in total) as the high status Green Group member (8 starting points + 3 allocated points = 11 points in total). Other choices in the tables allowed low status group members to get more points than the high status group member. For example, the 2/6 choice meant that the Red group member ended up with more points (6 + 6 = 12) than the Green group member (8 + 2 = 10).

Using this novel approach, we found that participants in the low status group were significantly more likely than participants in the high status group to choose the competitive in-group favoritism option (e.g., the 2/6 choice in the above table). So, we replicated the classic, competitive favoritism effect that is predicted by social identity theory.

However, we also found that participants in the low status group selected the compensatory favoritism option (e.g., the 3/5 choice in the table) significantly more than chance. Here, awarding more points to the in-group than to the out-group had the effect of compensating the in-group for its initial points disadvantage and leading to intergroup fairness.  Hence, the compensatory favoritism choice enabled the low status in-group to do as well as the high status out-group in terms of its points allocations but not necessarily better than the out-group.

Social identity theory has touted social competition as the key driver of social change (Tajfel and Turner, 1979). Our research suggests that, in the context of unequal intergroup status relations, social compensation can also provided a pathway to social change. Specifically, low status groups can use in-group favouritism to change the intergroup hierarchy by getting even with the high status group, rather than by surpassing it in status.

For further information, please see the following journal article:

Rubin, M., Badea, C., and Jetten, J. (2014). Low status groups show in-group favoritism to compensate for their low status and to compete for higher status. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations DOI: 10.1177/1368430213514122

For a self-archived version of this article, please see here.

Boys Don’t Cry, But They Can Be Sensitive! Behavioural Descriptions of Counterstereotypical People Cause Greater Prejudice than Personality Descriptions

Stereotypes are pretty useful things! We use them to help us to understand and respond to people from a large and diverse array of social groups. But how do people feel about individuals who buck the trend and contradict stereotypes? For example, how do people feel about a man who is crying or a woman who is smoking a cigar!

Most evidence shows that people react quite negatively towards counterstereotypical individuals. The typical explanation for this negative bias refers to people’s need to protect and maintain their stereotypes: People are biased against counterstereotypical individuals because they disconfirm stereotypes and threaten people’s need to maintain stable and coherent stereotype systems.

However, recent social psychological research has provided some hope for counterstereotypical people. This new evidence shows that, although counterstereotypical individuals are disliked when they are described using behaviours, they are actually liked when they are described using personality traits. So, for example, although people may dislike “a man who is crying”, they like “a sensitive man”. In both cases, the man is counterstereotypical because he contradicts a gender stereotype. However, in the former case he is described using a behavior (“crying”) and in the latter case he is described using a personality trait (“sensitive”). Notably, this linguistic description effect occurs even when the particular valence of the words that are used (positive/negative) is taken into account.

So, why does this linguistic description effect occur? Well, it’s possible that counterstereotypical individuals are evaluated relatively negatively when they are described using behaviours because this linguistic description promotes a deeper, more systematic processing of the person that highlights their stereotype disconfirmation and, as we know, people don’t like individuals who step out of line with their stereotypes! In contrast, counterstereotypical individuals may be evaluated relatively positively when they are described using personality traits because this linguistic description promotes a more superficial type of processing that highlights individuals’ uniqueness, and people tend to value uniqueness.

How is all this relevant to you? Well, if you stop for a minute and consider your own social categories (i.e., your gender, religion, occupation, age group, political orientation, etc), then I’m sure you’ll find at least one in which your own characteristics contradict your group’s stereotype. Now don’t worry – it's often good to be the black sheep! Throughout the ages, counterstereotypical people have been the agents of beneficial social change. For example, independent women (who were counterstereotypical for their time) spearheaded the Feminist movement. In addition, the diversity embodied by counterstereotypical people brings with it a wealth of positive outcomes in work and organisational contexts. So, you should feel proud if you’re different from the rest of your group. The trick is to get other people to appreciate you for your uniqueness, rather than to denigrate you for your deviance. And describing yourself in terms of personality traits rather than behaviours may provide one way to do this.

For further information, please see the following journal article:

Rubin, M., Paolini, S., & Crisp, R. J. (2013). Linguistic description moderates the evaluations of counterstereotypical people. Social Psychology, 44 (4), 289-298 DOI: 10.1027/1864-9335/a000114

For a self-archived version of this article, please see here.

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (Project DP0556908). However, the views expressed above are not necessarily those of the Australian Research Council.

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The Disproportionate Influence of Negative Intergroup Encounters on Prejudice

Back in February, I wrote about some research in which my colleagues and I showed that negative experiences with people from other groups are better at drawing attention to the people's group memberships than positive experiences (Paolini, Harwood, & Rubin, 2010). In other words, if you have a negative encounter with someone from another group, then you are more likely to think about their group memberships (e.g., their gender, race, nationality, etc.) than if you have a positive encounter with them. This increased awareness of a person's group memberships following a negative encounter with them is potentially problematic for the goal of reducing intergroup conflict in society because it means that people are naturally biased towards attributing bad things to out-group members' groups and generalizing their negative experiences with one out-group member to all of the other out-group members. Our preliminary evidence provided some support for this assumption, showing that people were more likely to mention a woman's ethnicity when she behaved negatively rather than positively. However, we did not go as far as testing whether this out-group salience effect led to greater prejudice against the out-group.

Now, Fiona Barlow and colleagues have found this missing piece of the puzzle in a series of research studies published this week (Barlow, Paolini, Pedersen, Hornsey, Radke, Harwood, Rubin, & Sibley, 2012). We looked at prejudice against Black Australians, Muslim Australians, and asylum seekers and found that negative experiences with these people were a stronger and more consistent predictor of negative attitudes towards them than positive experiences were of positive attitudes. For example, negative experiences, but not positive experiences, with Black Americans predicted suspicion about Barack Obama’s birthplace, which represents a subtle measure of racism.
  
These results suggest that negative experiences with out-group members are not only more likely than positive experiences to make people think about out-group members' group memberships, but also to influences people's attitudes towards the out-groups. Taken together, these two recent papers suggest that negative experiences with out-group members have a greater potential than positive experiences to influence people's thoughts and feelings about out-groups. This work implies that we should redouble our efforts to encourage positive experiences between members of different groups because this positive intergroup contact is naturally disadvantaged against improving intergroup relations when compared with the more powerful influence of negative intergroup contact.

For further information, please see the following journal article:  Barlow, F., Paolini, S., Pedersen, A., Hornsey, M., Radke, H., Harwood, J., Rubin, M., & Sibley, C. (2012). The Contact Caveat: Negative Contact Predicts Increased Prejudice More Than Positive Contact Predicts Reduced Prejudice Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38 (12), 1629-1643 DOI: 10.1177/0146167212457953

Prejudice Against Migrants: Is It Because They're Too Hard to Think About?

In some recent research, my colleagues and I showed that bias against migrants is related to how easy people find it to think about migrants.

We asked research participants to imagine a situation in which people were randomly divided into two very abstract social groups called “Group A” and “Group B”. Participants then imagined that, through a process of random selection, some people stayed in their original group (i.e., non-migrant individuals) and some people changed to the other group (i.e., migrants). Surprisingly, even under these artificial conditions, participants were biased against people who changed groups. They rated migrants as possessing fewer positive qualities (e.g., honest, attractive, friendly) and more negative qualities (e.g., unintelligent, aggressive, rude) than people who stayed in their original group. In addition, people who found it difficult to think about migrants showed a stronger bias than people who found it easy to think about migrants. These findings suggest that migrant bias may be related to the ease or difficulty that people have in thinking about migrants: People may not like migrants, in part, because they find them more difficult to process cognitively.

For example, consider a Mexican man who is living in Mexico and who then moves to live in America (although it could be anyone who moves from their home country to go to live in another country). To begin with, the Mexican is located in a predictive context – Mexico– and so people find him easy to think about or cognitively process. However, after he has moved to America, he becomes a migrant and his residence in America puts him in a nonpredictive context which makes him relatively difficult to process.

Our research suggests that these sorts of differences in cognitive processing fluency may be at least partly responsible for bias against migrants: People may dislike migrants partly because they find them more difficult to process. This area of research is in its infancy, and an obvious next step is to investigate whether our results generalize from abstract, laboratory-based migrants to migrants in the real world.

For further information, please see the following journal article: Rubin, M., Paolini, S., & Crisp, R. (2010). A processing fluency explanation of bias against migrants Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46 (1), 21-28 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2009.09.006

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (Project DP0556908). However, the views expressed above are not necessarily those of the Australian Research Council.

Positive and Negative Experiences with Members of Other Groups

When people have positive experiences with members of another group, they tend to generalize these experiences from the group member to the group as a whole. This process of member-to-group generalization results in less prejudice against the group. Notably, however, researchers have tended to ignore what happens when people have negative experiences with group members.

In a recent article, my colleagues and I proposed that negative experiences have an opposite but stronger effect on people's attitudes towards groups. In other words, negative experiences with group members produce a negative attitude towards the group that is stronger than the positive attitude produced by positive experiences. We assumed that this disproportionate influence of negative intergroup contact occurs because negative experiences draw attention to other people's groups, and this increased group salience allows greater generalization of negative experiences from group members to their groups.

To test this assumption, we asked 52 research participants to meet with a woman from Sri Lanka. Unbeknowst to our participants, we instructed the woman to behave in either a warm and relaxed manner (positive experience condition) or a distant and tense manner (negative experience condition). After the meeting, participants completed a questionnaire in which they described the woman. Participants in the negative experience condition were significantly more likely to mention the woman’s ethnicity compared to participants in the positive experience condition. Hence, consistent with our predictions, negative contact experiences were more likely to make people think about the other person’s group.

Our research findings are problematic for the goal of reducing prejudice because they indicate that negative experiences are more likely than positive experiences to generalize from group members to their groups. Hence, if an intergroup situation contains a mix of both positive and negative experiences, the negative experiences will have the most influence on attitudes about the group, leading to more prejudice, not less.

Our research leads to the worrying conclusion that intergroup contact may be naturally biased towards worsening intergroup relations rather than improving them. However, as we stress in our article, “our results are not a call and should not serve as a justification for intergroup segregation or isolationism”. Previous research has found that positive intergroup contact is a reliable and effective method for reducing prejudice (for a review, see Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). Hence, the real message of our work is that, when intergroup contact situations contain a mix of both positive and negative experiences, we need to strengthen the positive experiences in order to overcome the disproportionately powerful influence of the negative experiences and bring about an overall reduction in prejudice, discrimination, and intergroup conflict.

For further information, please see the following journal article: Paolini, S., Harwood, J., & Rubin, M. (2010). Negative Intergroup Contact Makes Group Memberships Salient: Explaining Why Intergroup Conflict Endures Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36 (12), 1723-1738 DOI: 10.1177/0146167210388667


This research was supported by the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (Project DP0770704). However, the views expressed above are not necessarily those of the Australian Research Council.