Rooting for the Home Team
Conflicts about social hierarchy, tension around religious differences, and even betting on Super Bowl winners share the dynamics of us and them. Rather than approaching each example separately, Dunham argues that the us-and-them phenomenon can explain most of the observations we have about inter-group dynamics, and the things it fails to explain should then constitute the primary focus of social psychology research.
“Our strong adaptations for group living have made humans so successful as a species over thousands of years; groups give us other people to cooperate with, trust, and learn from. On one hand, this ingroup bias has made us a deeply cultural, quick-to-learn species of flexible learners,” says Dunham. “But as soon as more than one group interacts, we see tendencies toward bias in the form of prejudice, discrimination, and stereotypes, and this is particularly true in more modern societies in which we’re just interacting with all kinds of different people all the time.”
While Dunham’s research examines the roots of these prejudices to find strategies for combatting them in an increasingly global society, this favoritism may still be helping humans develop as a species. “From an evolutionary perspective, I’m not sure ingroup bias is something we would actually want to overcome because it constitutes so much of how we learn as a cultural, social species,” he says.