Quotes About Outgroup

Social psychologists confirm that we are likely to perceive people outside our own community as more alike than those within it. We perceive members of our own group as individuals, but see other groups as more or less homogenous (psychologists call this the "outgroup homogeneity bias").

Outgroups mocking the ingroup is a weapon of the weak, lessening the sting of subordination. But when an ingroup mocks an outgroup, it solidifies negative stereotypes and reifies the hierarchy.

I suspect that it's because their belief system has segmented their world into a moral in-group and out-group so decisively that they're unconflicted about what they're doing. To them, the people they're killing are scarcely human. I think you share my concern about bad ideas being the malware that can get even psychologically normal people, biologically normal people, to do the unthinkable. How do you view this, in the context of your research?

if you're part of the Blue Tribe, then your outgroup isn't al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople, or Jews, or atheists—it's the Red Tribe." The real outgroup, for us, is the person next door.

Studies show that intergroup competition increases love of the in-group far more than it increases dislike of the out-group.

The evolutionary logic of team aggression is to kill as many members of the outgroup as possible, at as minimum risk to yourself as possible.

A few people -and a few chimpanzees- are just frankly antisocial. Presumably, such cases are the result of something going grievously wrong in a brain that has been built by a particular combination of genes and then submitted to a particular set of environmental pressures, so that it places almost everyone in an outgroup. When such individuals act alone, they are antisocial. But when they gain control over groups or even whole nations, they join the ranks of history's greatest villains.

Once individuals are identified as belonging to an outgroup, there seems to be no limit to he human capacity for cruelty.

Once individuals are identified as belonging to an outgroup, there seems to be no limit to the human capacity for cruelty.

The almost universal nature of within-group amity and between-group enmity, wherein the rule-of-thumb heuristic is to trust in-group members until they prove otherwise to be distrustful, and to distrust out-group members until they prove otherwise to be trustful.