Abstract
From evolutionary reasoning, we derived a novel hypothesis that ingroup derogation is an adaptation to a special ecological condition in which the greater threat of aggression is incurred by ingroup members. This hypothesis was tested and supported across five studies. Specifically, the computational modeling found that ingroup derogation could easily evolve if the chance of death incurred by intragroup conflicts was no less than 10%. Further behavioral experiments on Chinese participants showed that the ingroup derogation mechanism responded to heuristic social category cues and it responded more strongly when participants subjectively felt more vulnerable to interpersonal aggression, or when there were contextual cues of aggression in the immediate environment. Additional results showed that Chinese participants responded more strongly to aggression cues originating from ingroup members and that they endorsed more ingroup derogation attitudes even when the ingroup and outgroup members were both displaying cues of aggression. In addition, the results also revealed that the Chinese participants perceived more intentions of aggression from ingroup members than from outgroup members even in the absence of any clear signs of those intentions, and such a bias was positively correlated with ingroup derogation attitudes. Taken together, these results suggest that ingroup derogation is related to the evolved response of intragroup aggression management system.
Highlights
IntroductionCalled outgroup favoritism, is a preference for outgroup members relative to one’s ingroup members (Jost et al, 2002; Ma-Kellams et al, 2011; Zhao et al, 2012; March and Graham, 2015; Wu et al, 2015)
The results obtained by behavioral experiments (Studies 2 and 3) further showed that, as it should be for an evolved threat management mechanism, the ingroup derogation mechanism followed the smoke detector principle and the functional flexibility principle
The results revealed that the ingroup derogation mechanism separately responded to the aggression cues mediated by ingroup and outgroup members, and a stronger avoidance response was elicited by the aggression threat incurred by ingroup members
Summary
Called outgroup favoritism, is a preference for outgroup members relative to one’s ingroup members (Jost et al, 2002; Ma-Kellams et al, 2011; Zhao et al, 2012; March and Graham, 2015; Wu et al, 2015). It was reported that the Chinese implicitly associated European Americans with more positive traits than their own ethnic group (Ma-Kellams et al, 2011)
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