In our divided society, it seems that it’s not enough to like members of your ingroup, you also have to show equal, if not more, disdain for those in the outgroup. Indeed, if you happen to like those in an outgroup it’s often viewed as being because you dislike your ingroup.

For instance, during Brexit discussions, the approval people have of the EU is often portrayed by leave supporters as because those people hate the United Kingdom. Research from UC Riverside highlights how reductionist this assumption is.

“Our findings suggest that outgroup preference does not necessarily reflect negative feelings about the ingroup as much as it reflects positive feelings about the outgroup,” the researchers explain.

Implicit bias

Our supposed support for our ingroup is a form of implicit bias, which the researchers measured via an Implicit Association Test (IAT), whereby participants had to sort words related to either ingroups or outgroups. If respondents responded quicker to some words than others then it suggests the connections between words are stronger.

In total, nearly 900,000 people took the test, with implicit bias measured in terms of both race and sexual preference. Among participants from lower-status groups, they consistently showed more positive evaluations of the outgroup than they did negative evaluations of their own group. What’s more, this pattern persisted among participants from higher-status groups.

“Whenever people like a higher-status group, it’s not necessarily at the expense of the lower-status group,” the researchers explain.

There was an exception to the finding that one can like an outgroup without feeling negatively toward one’s ingroup. White and young people who showed implicit bias in favor of other races or older people were more likely to have negative feelings about their ingroups.