🐑 Don't Always Trust Your In-Group

Why you should look beyond teammate favoritism

A quick way to make sensible decisions is to copy the people around you. We dress like our social groups when there are no rules dictating that we must, we adopt political beliefs that fit into our political tribes, and we use products and services that our friends use to avoid missing out. All of this makes sense because it prevents us from becoming outcasts. But occasionally, it starts to obscure reality.

Solomon Asch showed decades ago that people will answer an easy question incorrectly just to avoid looking different. Here’s an example that every psychology student knows: Which of the colorful lines below (A, B, or C) is the same height as the black line?

It should be fairly obvious that the correct answer is C. But when participants answered together with a group of secret research accomplices who were hired to give wrong answers, they would often go against their own intelligence to conform to the group’s incorrect answer. 5% of people always conformed to the group answer, and 75% of people gave at least one incorrect answer during the experiment (compared to only 3% in a control group with no social pressure).

This raises important questions about how far social conformity goes. How much do we copy in-groups compared to out-groups? Do we copy people even when they’re not especially reliable? When is it a mistake to follow the crowd?

Comic from conecandy.com

👥 Do people rely too much on in-groups?

In a recent study, researchers at McGill University asked 360 people to play an online game in which they had to guess which of two nests a rabbit was hiding behind. The only predictable thing about the rabbit was that it liked to stay put. In each round of the game, there was a 90% chance that the rabbit would hide in the same nest as the last round and a 10% chance that it would switch to the opposite nest. Every five rounds, people got an overall score telling them how often they found the rabbit and how their performance compared to other people’s scores.

Before starting the game, the researchers randomly assigned each player to a color-coded group. The purpose was to give people a sense of shared identity if they fell into the same group (e.g. a “red” or “blue” identity). The groups were totally arbitrary, but it allowed the researchers to test how people used social information that came from in-groups vs out-groups.

In each rabbit-finding round, participants had to choose three other people from a small pool of in-group and out-group members and observe their nest selections. This meant each participant could make decisions based on what other people were doing if they wanted to use social information.

This slightly complicated setup (which I’ve simplified here) ensured that researchers could measure two types of bias in people’s decision-making:

1. Attention: How often do people choose to observe the responses of in-group members vs out-group members?

2. Copying: How often do people copy the responses of in-group members vs out-group members?

Of all the players that participants chose to observe, 61% were in-group members and 39% were out-group members. Whenever participants chose to copy an observed response, they copied an in-group member 62% of the time and an out-group member 38% of the time. Even though groups were randomly assigned and meaningless, people’s decision-making showed a greater trust and favoritism toward their own group colors.

When asked to rate the reliability of each group, most people felt that in-group and out-group members were equally reliable. So the fact that they preferentially copied in-group members wasn’t driven by a belief that they were more likely to be right, but rather by a deeper “follow my own herd” instinct.

In a second experiment, the researchers dug a little deeper by changing the number of other players each participant could choose to observe. Instead of asking participants to choose three people throughout the experiment, they varied the number between one and four.

When groups were smaller, people showed stronger in-group copying biases. As the availability of social information decreased, people became more likely to rely on others with a shared identity (again, even if that identity was totally made up).

This time, the researchers also found some differences in how each group was perceived. Instead of requesting reliability ratings for each group, they asked people to estimate how “warm” and “competent” in-group and out-group members were on a scale from 1-5.

Before the game started, people rated in-group members as 0.51 points warmer and 0.53 points more competent than out-group members. Over the course of the game, this confident optimism waned a little. However, at the end of the experiment, there was still a significant favoritism bias with people rating in-group members 0.39 points warmer and 0.36 points more competent than out-group members.

This in-group favoritism in perception didn’t particularly affect decision-making though. Behavioral biases toward copying the in-group were so powerful and automatic that they overrode people’s feelings about each group. As the researchers put it in their paper: “beliefs about the groups had surprisingly little effect on copying; even participants who rated the out-group as warmer or more competent showed an in-group-copying bias”.

⭐️ Takeaway tips

• In-group biases run deep: In-group favoritism is difficult to avoid, even when it’s clearly dysfunctional. Sometimes, the bias captures our behavior despite us consciously realizing that it’s irrational. Even when we’re aware that groups are randomly selected, we can’t help but extend greater trust toward the random people on our team.

• Use social information wisely: Social information is one source of guidance on how to behave and make decisions but don’t let it crowd out other important sources such as logic, data, and personal experience. Your own instinct will occasionally get the better of a group’s consensus, so don’t be afraid to push against conventions when necessary. Look at every angle. What do my friends believe is true and why? What’s the best alternative idea I can come up with? How can I find evidence to confirm that my group’s consensus is correct before running with it?

• Actively explore out-group opinions: Diverse opinions and viewpoints are immensely valuable. It’s easy to get locked in social bubbles because they feed us with what we love to hear. If you want the strongest possible perspective on an important issue, embrace the discomfort of talking to people you disagree with. It’s impossible to comprehensively understand a philosophical, scientific, ethical, or political question without a full awareness of the competing theories and their merits.

💡 A final quote

“Yield not one inch to all the forces which conspire to make you an echo.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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👋 Until next time,

Erman Misirlisoy, PhD

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