Outgroup

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In social psychology, the outgroup is a term of art denoting the set of persons not considered to be members of an ingroup. The ingroup is any group to which an individual may belong to or identify with. Ingroup and outgroup membership can be context dependent. For example, while watching a sports game, two people could be in each other's outgroups since they support opposing teams, while afterwards, they could be in each other's ingroups due to being colleagues, family members, or friends.

Biases related to the outgroup

When feelings of dislike or hatred towards an outgroup are strong, this can influence pragmatic or moral reasoning through cognitive biases. LessWrong-style rationalists often make reference to outgroup biases and trying to avoid them, although a danger of applying this stricture too rigidly is that it can lead to being so open-minded that your brain falls out, and joining a weird cult like NRx after being lured in by plausible-sounding(?) bullshit. Sometimes, the outgroup really does contain bad — or misguided — people, and sometimes people's intuitions are right about this. That said, intuition is rarely necessary, since both religious and political cults tend to be glaringly irrational and/or promulgating doctrines contrary to known facts. So the main thing is, while avoiding outgroup cognitive biases, try not to forget about all the other cognitive biases human wetware is prone to. Basically, if the thought ends with "because he is one of Them, and They are Bad People", question it at the very least.

Outgroup homogeneity bias

Outgroup homogeneity bias is the tendency for individuals to see members of their own ingroup as being varied, but members of the outgroup as being "all the same". This is the parent of Jonanism. Outgroup homogeneity bias would manifest as people saying things like all people of a certain race "look the same to me", or making racist generalisations about behaviour from individuals to entire groups. The most comical example is the Indian far-right insult "Chrislamocommie", because as we all know, Christians, Muslims, and communists all 100% agree with each other on every issue.

Double standards

See the main article on this topic: Double standard

One manifestation of ingroup/outgroup bias is that the outgroup is treated differently with respect to moral or ethical decisions. For example, "because the person I am interacting with is a bad person, I will use an argument I know to be not entirely accurate to make him or her look stupid, because this will help me win this Reddit argument".

See also

• Other
• Stereotype