Back من الجماعة وخارج الجماعة Arabic Členská skupina Czech Eigengruppe und Fremdgruppe German Endogrupo y exogrupo Spanish درون گروهی و برون گروهی Persian Groupes interne et externe (sociologie) French קבוצת פנים וקבוצת חוץ HE 내집단과 외집단 Korean In-groep en uit-groep Dutch Endogrupo e exogrupo Portuguese

In-group and out-group

"Us and them" redirects here. For other uses, see Us and Them.
For use in cladistics, see Ingroup and outgroup (cladistics).

Multiple layers of in-groups and out-groups in an American football stadium:
  • People in this stadium form an in-group of American football fans and professionals vs. those who are not fans of the sport.
  • Fans in attendance at the stadium vs. people spectating the match via external means, e.g. television/radio coverage.
  • Fans and professionals affiliated with one team vs. those affiliated with the opposing team.
  • Professionals on the field (players, officials, coaches, mascots and cheerleaders) vs. the paying customers in the stands who are denied access to the facility's secure nucleus except by invitation from a high-status individual.
  • Ranks of the wealthy ownership and their senior executive staff, with access to private box suites vs. high-priced talent.
  • Technical staff involved in facilities maintenance and operations vs. sporting staff (referees, timekeepers, statisticians and in-game adjudicators).
  • Media with organizational endorsement and affiliation who enjoy special player access to one team vs. non-affiliated media.

In social psychology and sociology, an in-group is a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member. By contrast, an out-group is a social group with which an individual does not identify. People may for example identify with their peer group, family, community, sports team, political party, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or nation. It has been found that the psychological membership of social groups and categories is associated with a wide variety of phenomena.

The terminology was made popular by Henri Tajfel and colleagues beginning in the 1970s during his work in formulating social identity theory. The significance of in-group and out-group categorization was identified using a method called the minimal group paradigm. Tajfel and colleagues found that people can form self-preferencing in-groups within a matter of minutes and that such groups can form even on the basis of completely arbitrary and invented discriminatory characteristics, such as preferences for certain paintings.[1][2][3][4]

In neurology, there is an established literature[5] about the innate propensity of the human brain to divide the world into us and them valence categories, where the exact membership of the in-group and out-group are socially contingent (hence vulnerable to the instruments of propaganda), and the intensity exists along a spectrum from mild to complete dehumanization of the "othered" group (such as through pseudospeciation).

  1. ^ See "Kandinsky versus Klee experiment", Tajfel et al. (1971) in Tajfel, H. (1970). Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination.
  2. ^ Taijfel, H. (1970). "Experiments in intergroup discrimination" (PDF). Scientific American. 223 (5): 96–102. Bibcode:1970SciAm.223e..96T. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1170-96. JSTOR 24927662. PMID 5482577. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2019-12-06.
  3. ^ Tajfel, Henri; Billig, M. G.; Bundy, R. P.; Flament, Claude (1971). "Social categorization and intergroup behaviour". European Journal of Social Psychology. 1 (2): 149–178. doi:10.1002/ejsp.2420010202.
  4. ^ Tajfel, H. (1974). "Social identity and intergroup behaviour". Social Science Information. 13 (2): 65–93. doi:10.1177/053901847401300204. S2CID 143666442.
  5. ^ Sapolsky, Robert (2017). Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Penguin. pp. 38–39, 84–93, 116–117, 387–493, 570–632. ISBN 978-1-59420-507-1.

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