Common Ingroup Identity Model

The common ingroup identity model represents a strategy for reducing prejudice that assumes that intergroup biases are rooted in fundamental, normal psychological processes, particularly in the universal tendency to simplify a complex environment by classifying objects and people into groups or categories. This process of categorization often occurs spontaneously on the basis of physical similarity, proximity, or shared fate. When people or objects are categorized into groups, actual differences between members of the same category tend to be perceptually minimized, and differences between members of different groups become exaggerated and overgeneralized.