Ingroups, Outgroups, and Their
Affect on Behaviors

We as humans tend to relate to those that are similar to us, and tend to alienate those that we deem as different than us. Whether it is by race, gender, culture, or religion, it is something that is almost always present in human interactions, and often times can be completely subconscious. In our textbook Interpersonal Communication by Kory Floyd, an ingroup is defined as “A group of people with whom one identifies.” An outgroup is conversely defined as “A group of people whom one does not identify.” Henri Tajfel first coined this terminology while he was working to devise his social identity theory. These ideas of classifying people into ingroups and outgroups can lead to many different social behaviors in society. Three major phenomena that are most commonly linked with ingroups and outgroups are, ingroup bias, social influence, and group homogeneity. Better understanding of these four ideas, and how they work with and against each other will allow for a clearer appreciation of why many different interpersonal interactions take place in the manner that they do.
Henri Tajfel pioneered these concepts in 1970 when he was investigating his concept of social identity theory. In his study, titled Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination, the aim of his experiments was to, “Demonstrate that merely putting people into groups (categorization) is sufficient for people to discriminate in favor of their own group and against members of the other group.” He did so by conducting two different experiments. Both entailed large groups of young boys ages 14 and 15 being split into two distinct groups. In the first experiment, the boys were separated at random, but were told they had been separated by how they estimated the number of dots on flashing pictures. They were told they were split into groups of over-estimators and under-estimators. Once separated into groups, the boys were tasked with assessing rewards and penalties of monetary value to every participant in the study. The second experiment was done in the same manner, but the boys were told that they were split up depending on their preference between to paintings they were shown. However, they were once again split at random. This study provided very conclusive results that pointed to the fact that, “When the subjects had a choice between maximizing the profit for all and maximizing the profit for members of their own group, they acted on behalf of their own group.”1 This study clearly proves that there are certain ingroups and outgroups that people identify and discriminate between. This finding allowed a great deal of further research into this theory, and lead to this concept being linked to the three phenomena mentioned earlier.
Ingroup bias is the first set of behaviors that I will examine. Ingroup bias is the practice of favoring members of your ingroup over outgroup members. In general, there are two explanations as to why this theory holds true, competition and self-esteem. Competition is mostly used as an explanation when there is a limited amount of resources needing to be split up between groups. However, it can be applied to any situation where an ingroup and outgroup are pitted against each other in any fashion. Philip Mohr and Kerry Larsen conducted a study of umpires in Australian football. The umpiring decisions for teams from the same state as the umpire and for teams from a different state were examined for 171 games over a period of 4 years. The results found that the umpires gave substantially more rewards, such as penalty kicks, to teams from their own state, their ingroup, than teams from out of state, their outgroup. “In matches between the two groups of football teams, the teams from the same state as the umpires received more favorable decisions than the other teams did by a margin of 11% for the 171 games studied.” In situations where the umpires had to allocate rewards to members of a group they identified with competing against a group they did not identify with they clearly favored their ingroup. This study helped proved the theory that intergroup competition is a prevalent reason why ingroup favoritism is often exhibited in society. This idea is completely embedded into the entire sporting culture of our society today. We group ourselves together with the “home team” or the ingroup. We prefer for that group, as well as ourselves by association, to be successful. The second explanation that is usually offered is the idea that people will have a better opinion of people in their ingroup in order to boost their own self-esteem by association. Robert Cialdini conducted a very interesting study on a concept called Basking in Reflected Glory (BIRG) at several different universities. In order to study how self-esteem was a determinant of ingroup bias, Cialdini and his team researched the behavior of students after victories and losses of the school’s football teams. Their results “Demonstrated the BIRG phenomenon by showing a greater tendency for university students to wear school-identifying apparel after their school’s football team had been victorious than nonvictorious… and by showing that students used the pronoun we more when describing a victory than a nonvictory.” These students had nothing to do with the actual success of the team, however, they publicly associated themselves with winning group in order to boost their own self-esteem. This concept can often be portrayed in the idea of “bandwagon” fans of sports teams. Whenever a team begins to become successful and starts winning, fans jump on the so-called bandwagon and begin associating themselves with the winning team. However, when the team is doing poorly, they will not associate themselves with it. This concept of ingroup bias is clearly present throughout society. Both competition and the goal of boosting self-confidence are key components as to why this incident occurs. Another phenomenon that is often associated with in and outgroups is social influence. People’s social behaviors can often be altered simply to align with the social norm or prevailing behavior of any ingroup they may belong to. Harvard Professor Herbert Kelman was one of the pioneers in researching this concept. He claimed that there were three different reasons that people accept social influence, compliance, identification, and internalization. Compliance occurs when an individual accepts influence in the hope that they will gain a positive reaction from a certain group. “He adopts the induced behavior not because he believes in its content but because he expects to gain specific rewards or approval and avoid specific punishments or disapproval by conforming.” Peer pressure is a very good example of this. If you were at a bar with friends and they convince you to have another drink, even though you may not feel like it, you have conformed and complied to their influence. Identification is the act of accepting influence from a person or group that is very popular or revered, often times celebrities. American marketing is a perfect example of identification in effect. A celebrity’s endorsement of a certain product can dramatically affect that product’s sales. According to research by Kevin Chung, Nike’s golf ball division saw an increase in profit of $103 million from 2000 to 2010 after Tiger Woods offered his endorsement of their products. Internalization is when someone’s beliefs and behaviors can change over time because of influences from certain ingroups. People are constantly evolving morally, which is often due to outside influences. Over time their behavior and new beliefs will eventually align with one another. A good example of this is when someone’s political views are changed after listening to a debate. These three variations of social influence all lead to the further discrimination between ingroups and outgroups regardless of the individual’s belief or conviction in terms of the behavior. This further proves that we show increased association to groups we identify with. Group Homogeneity is the tendency for members of social groups to think that all members of groups are the same. Most often it is the case that people group members of outgroups together as being the same and believing that the members of their ingroup are diverse. This way of thinking often leads towards negative and generalized biases about the outgroup, and more varying, usually positive biases towards the ingroup. Markus Brauer conducted a survery among four different occupational groups, doctors, lawyers, hairdressers, and waiters. These subjects were asked to fill out surveys about each of the four groups, knowing only their occupation and ethnic background. The results of this survey were very conclusive. “Members of these groups displayed a strong tendency to see out-groups in a homogeneous and negative manner. All four groups viewed the in-group as more variable and more positive than the out-groups.” Even when little more than their occupations were known, all participants viewed the outgroup as being “all the same.” This trend can be seen in a huge number of everyday occurrences in society. On college campuses, members of greek houses, athletic teams, and other clubs or activities are often portrayed to all be the same. However, members of these groups often try to highlight how their membership is so diverse with people of different backgrounds, skills, and personalities. This same study by Brauer also attempted to investigate the effect of group homogeneity on ethnocentrism. Our textbook defines ethnocentrism as “The systematic preference for characteristics of one’s own culture.”1 The study found very similar results for ethnocentrism. The subjects tended to portrayed members of their own ethnicity often much more positively and diversely, while they lumped members of other ethnicities into similar traits, often negatively. A much simpler explanation for why we tend to assimilate with our surroundings in order to fit in to a certain group is offered in our textbook. “For some people, being perceived as different can be an exciting or intriguing experience. For others, however, that experience can be stress inducing. For example, research shows that immigrants often experience abnormally high stress during their first year in their new homeland.”1 Being a part of a minority or an outgroup is, simply put, just extremely stressful. It is much easier to be a part of an ingroup than outgroup. As those immigrants began to assimilate to their new society they began to associate themselves more with their surrounding and become part of the larger ingroup. This led to much lower stress levels. This only further proves that we are more comfortable identifying with groups that we deem similar to us, and uncomfortable with being immersed in outgroups. All of these examples can intertwine in order to better explain why we have this innate desire to categorize ourselves into ingroups and outgroups. The idea of boosting one’s self-esteem being a driving force behind ingroup bias can be linked to many different aspects of this paper. Almost all social influence can be connected to wanting to improve one’s self-esteem, whether it be through succumbing to peer pressure to look good, or buying the new Nike golf ball because Tiger Woods is endorsing it. A similar correlation can be made to the idea of group homogeneity. Often times people will group outgroups together in a negative way in order to make their ingroup seem better, in turn boosting their self-esteem. It is in our very nature as humans to associate ourselves within groups we identify with and distance ourselves from groups that differ from us. There are many reasons for this behavior, such as competition for resources and attempts at boosting self-esteem. These lead to an increase in favoritism or a bias towards ingroups and an alienation of outgroups. Society can influence our behaviors through members of our ingroups as well as outgroups. Our behaviors and ideas can change simply because they will mirror a cultural or societal norm, or we can follow celebrities or public figures and allow them to influence our decisions and lives. Outgroups can influence us by changing the way we think in order for new beliefs to match up with our actions and behaviors. There is an overwhelming tendency in society to portray members of ingroups as diverse in a very positive way. The opposite can be said for outgroups, while they are typically stereotyped. This innate categorization that all of us participate in can also be explained simply by the level of difficulty being immersed into outgroups and becoming a minority. Ultimately, many of our behaviors can be linked to the way we categorize everyone into ingroups and outgroups.

References
1. Floyd, K. (2011). Interpersonal communication. (2nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
2. Tajfel, H. (1970). Experiments in intergroup discrimination. Scientific American,223(5), 96-102.
3. Mohr, P. B., & Larsen, K. (1998). Ingroup favoritism in umpiring decisions in Australian football. The Journal of social psychology, 138(4), 495-504.
4. Cialdini, R. B., Borden, R. J., Thorne, A., Walker, M. R., Freeman, S., & Sloan, L. R. (1976). Basking in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies. Journal of personality and social psychology, 34(3), 366-375.
5. Kelman, H. C. (1958). Compliance, identification, and internalization: Three processes of attitude change. The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2(1), 51-60.
6. Chung, K. Y., Derdenger, T., & Srinivasan, K. (2011). Economic Value of Celebrity Endorsements: Tiger Woods’ Impact on Sales of Nike Golf Balls. CMU Working Paper. http://www. andrew. cmu. edu/user/derdenge/TWExecutiveSummary. pdf.
7. Brauer, M. (2001). Intergroup perception in the social context: The effects of social status and group membership on perceived out-group homogeneity and ethnocentrism. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 37(1), 15-31.

--------------------------------------------
[ 1 ]. 1 Floyd (pg 37)
[ 2 ]. Mohr (pg 500)
[ 3 ]. Cialdini (pg 366)
[ 4 ]. Kelman (pg 53)
[ 5 ]. Chung ( pg 3)
[ 6 ]. Brauer (pg 27)
[ 7 ]. 1 Floyd (pg 37)
[ 8 ]. 1 Floyd (pg 37)