Ingroup Allocation Bias

History

Early-20th-century social psychologists focused their research not only on discrimination in jobs and housing but also on discriminatory behaviors such as racist speech, hate crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. In his seminal work, The Nature of Prejudice, Gordon Allport explored the causes of prejudice and discrimination from a multidisciplinary perspective that included historical analysis, economics, sociology, and psychology. Within the psychoanalytic tradition, Theodor Adorno and his colleagues, in their classic book The Authoritarian Personality, proposed that certain family socialization practices could foster a personality that was intolerant of ambiguity and of the weak and powerless; thus creating a framework for prejudice and discrimination toward devalued ethnic minorities.

Within social psychology, Muzafer Sherif developed realistic conflict theory as a functional explanation of prejudice and discrimination, which shifted the focus of explanation from a solely intrapersonal to an intergroup level of analysis. Sherif and his contemporaries showed that intergroup cooperation to attain a shared goal or to avoid a common threat was related to more favorable intergroup attitudes and the equal allocation of resources to ingroup and outgroup members, while objective competition for scarce resources (jobs, housing, territories) was related to unfavorable intergroup attitudes and antagonistic and discriminatory behaviors.

As a complementary approach, Henri Tajfel proposed a cognitive and motivational analysis that sought to explain circumstances when prejudice and discrimination prevailed despite the absence of objective conflict of interest. Tajfel and John Turner developed social identity theory in part to explain laboratory studies showing that the mere categorization of people into “us and them” could be sufficient to trigger ingroup favoritism in the distribution of resources between anonymous ingroup and outgroup members. Social identity theory proposed that group members may use discrimination to achieve a more positive and distinctive social identity relative to outgroups in polarized intergroup settings.

The endorsement of racist and nationalistic ideologies that legitimize the glorification of the ingroup and the disparagement of outgroups has also been related to prejudiced attitudes toward devalued minorities and associated mistreatment through social and institutional discrimination. Taken together, intrapersonal, intergroup, and ideological processes contribute to a social psychological account of prejudice and discrimination. Such processes also may account for intergroup allocation strategies ranging from ingroup favoritism to parity and outgroup favoritism.

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