In group/out group psychology is fairly well known, with people tending to form opinions of others often depending on whether they belong, or not, to their particular group.  Politics is riddled with this, and this is a major factor in the polarization that is so evident in politics today.

New research from Duke University explores how a desire to be part of a group affects our likelihood of discriminating against those outside of our groups.

“It’s not the political group that matters, it’s whether an individual just generally seems to like being in a group,” the researchers say.  “Some people are ‘groupy’ – they join a political party, for example, and if you put those people in any arbitrary setting, they’ll act in a more biased way than somebody who has the same political opinions, but doesn’t join a political party.”

Testing groupiness

The researchers tested their hypothesis among a group of 141 volunteers who were asked to allocate money to either themselves and someone in their group, or to themselves and someone outside their group.

This basic experiment was conducted across a range of environments, such as when the volunteers were divided into groups according to their self-declared political leanings.  The researchers expected to find that people’s opinions tended to remain within their group, and that they would discriminate against those outside it.  This wasn’t entirely the case however.

Instead, what emerged was that the more people were attached to the group itself, the more likely they were to be biased against those outside their group.  This was consistent across all of the contexts used in the experiment.

“There is this very specific distinction between the self-declared partisans and politically similar independents,” the researchers say. “They don’t differ in their political positions, but they do behave differently toward people who are outside their groups.”

Independent thinkers

The results showed that around a third of participants weren’t swayed by their group membership, and the data suggests that these people were most likely to be politically independent.

“People who say they’re politically independent are much less likely to show bias in a non-political setting,” the researchers explain.

What was also interesting was that people who were less influenced by their group tended to make faster decisions.

“We don’t know if non-groupy people are faster generally,” the researchers continue. “It could be they’re making decisions faster because they’re not paying attention to whether somebody is in their group or not each time they have to make a decision.”

The tendency of someone to follow their group is somewhat uncertain, but the researchers believe that things such as our gender or ethnicity are almost certainly not likely to be influential.

“There’s some feature of a person that causes them to be sensitive to these group divisions and use them in their behavior across at least two very different contexts,” they conclude. “We didn’t test every possible way in which people differentiate themselves; we can’t show you that all group-minded identities behave this way. But this is a compelling first step.”