Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Evolutionary accounts suggest that individuals readily categorize other individuals into an ingroup and an outgroup, and consequently display a strong preference for positive behaviors towards the members of the ingroup relative to the outgroup. In the current study, we tested whether the robust ingroup bias could be modulated at the perceptual level based upon differential contextual information about group characteristics and group relations. Across the four experiments, participants performed a social associative matching task within the minimal group framework. We found that while the ingroup bias is certainly robust, it gets attenuated if the outgroup is portrayed positively and also when the ingroup is depicted negatively. This may have consequences for researchers studying intergroup conflict and consequent policy-making.