Outgroup homogeneity bias
Prejudice and social cognition
Hey all,
Welcome to Human Nature, the illustrated psychology newsletter.
In the last post, we explored personality approaches to prejudice. Over the next few weeks, we are going to dive into cognitive explanations of prejudice.
Today’s topic is outgroup homogeneity bias.
Outgroup homogeneity bias
What it is: The outgroup homogeneity bias refers to our tendency to see members of the outgroup as more homogenous than the ingroup. We see people who belong to an outside group (for example, people of a different nationality or political party than us) as more similar to each other and less diverse than people who we share a group membership with. This leads to stereotyping and overgeneralising, which can in turn result in prejudiced thinking.
How it was discovered: In a series of 1982 studies, Park and Rothbart assessed participants’ perceptions of ingroup and outgroup homogeneity.
In one study, they asked sorority members to judge the similarity of members of their own group versus the similarity of other groups. As predicted, they found that participants judged members of their own sorority to be more varied and diverse than did members of other sororities.
Why it happens: One obvious explanation for the outgroup homogeneity bias is that of selective exposure. We simply have more contact with our ingroup and therefore more data about them than we do about the outgroup. However, the above study also found that both men and women perceived members of the opposite gender to be more like each other than members their own. Since the vast majority of people have exposure to people of different genders on a regular basis, selective exposure doesn’t seem probable.
A more likely explanation is one linked to social categorisation, which refers to our tendency to highlight within-group similarities and between-group differences when both groups are together (in other words, in an intergroup context). However, when interacting with an ingroup member in the absence of the outgroup, we have don’t have any motivation to focus on our similarities. Instead, we’re motivated to perceive them as a unique individual with their own characteristics. In contrast, all our interactions with the outgroup occur in an intergroup context by default, us being the ingroup and them being the outgroup. Due to this asymmetry in the way we perceive the ingroup versus the outgroup, we are more likely to have a more homegenous view of the outgroup overall than we do of the ingroup.
Thank you for reading, see you next time.
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It seems as if no matter how much progress is made on the path towards equality and tolerance, prejudice and discrimination stubbornly persist all across the world. However, in order to combat prejudice, we must first understand how it works. In this series of Human Nature, we explore the mechanisms behind prejudiced thinking and behaviour through the lens of social psychology.