💡
After establishing common fate by the coin toss--one group would win a small prize and the other would not--students in an experiment were then asked to judge how similar or different members of each group were. There was a robust in-group/out-group effect even in this ad hoc grouping. Members of the in-group reported that people in their group--people they had just met--had more desirable qualities, and that they'd rather spend time with them. Other studies showed that similar flimsy manipulations lead in-group members to rate themselves as more different from one another than out-group members. ... When we think about organizing our social world, the implication of in-group/out-group bias is clear. We have a stubborn tendency to misjudge outsiders and hence diminish our abilities to forge new, cooperative, and potentially valuable social relations. Racism is a form of negative social judgment that arises from a combination of belief perseverance, out-group bias, categorization error, and faulty inductive reasoning. We hear about a particular undesirable trait or act on the part of an individual, and jump to the false conclusion that this is something completely predictable for someone of that ethnic or national background.