Department of Psychology, Yonsei University, Seoul 03722, Korea;
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Aug 1;114(31):8199-8204. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1706286114. Epub 2017 Jul 17.
One pervasive facet of human interactions is the tendency to favor ingroups over outgroups. Remarkably, this tendency has been observed even when individuals are assigned to minimal groups based on arbitrary markers. Why is mere categorization into a minimal group sufficient to elicit some degree of ingroup favoritism? We consider several accounts that have been proposed in answer to this question and then test one particular account, which holds that ingroup favoritism reflects in part an abstract and early-emerging sociomoral expectation of ingroup support. In violation-of-expectation experiments with 17-mo-old infants, unfamiliar women were first identified (using novel labels) as belonging to the same group, to different groups, or to unspecified groups. Next, one woman needed instrumental assistance to achieve her goal, and another woman either provided the necessary assistance (help event) or chose not to do so (ignore event). When the two women belonged to the same group, infants looked significantly longer if shown the ignore as opposed to the help event; when the two women belonged to different groups or to unspecified groups, however, infants looked equally at the two events. Together, these results indicate that infants view helping as expected among individuals from the same group, but as optional otherwise. As such, the results demonstrate that from an early age, an abstract expectation of ingroup support contributes to ingroup favoritism in human interactions.
人类互动中一个普遍的方面是倾向于对内群体而不是外群体有利。值得注意的是，即使个体是根据任意标记被分配到最小群体中，这种倾向也被观察到了。为什么仅仅将个体归为最小群体就足以引起某种程度的内群体偏爱？我们考虑了为回答这个问题而提出的几种解释，然后测试了一种特定的解释，即内群体偏爱部分反映了对内群体支持的抽象和早期出现的社会道德期望。在对 17 个月大的婴儿进行的违反期望实验中，首先用新奇的标签将陌生的女性识别为属于同一群体、不同群体或未指定群体。接下来，一名女性需要工具性帮助来实现她的目标，另一名女性要么提供必要的帮助（帮助事件），要么选择不这样做（忽略事件）。当两名女性属于同一群体时，如果展示忽略事件而不是帮助事件，婴儿会明显地注视更长时间；然而，当两名女性属于不同群体或未指定群体时，婴儿会同样注视两个事件。总的来说，这些结果表明，婴儿认为在同一群体的个体之间帮助是预期的，但在其他情况下则是可选的。因此，这些结果表明，从早期开始，对内群体支持的抽象期望对内群体偏好在人类互动中起到了作用。
