The cultural prevalence of the minimal group effect

Abstract

Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to meaningless experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). Thus, the extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains unclear. This registered report focuses on three questions. First, how culturally prevalent is the MGE? Second, how do critical cultural and individual factors moderate its strength? Third, does the MGE meaningfully relate to culturally salient real-world ingroup biases? Here we compare the MGE to bias in favor of a family member (i.e., first cousin) and a national ingroup member. We propose to recruit a sample of > 200 participants in each of > 50 nations to examine these questions and advance our understanding of the psychological foundations and cultural prevalence of ingroup bias.

 

Nature Human Behavior, accepted (Pre-registered report).