In-Group Bias

Why:

Understanding In-Group Bias helps us understand social dynamics and create more inclusive groups.

Warm-Up:

Have you ever been excluded from a group, or seen someone excluded? What happened?

Exploration:

We all have many biases in our thinking, each one an assumption that our brains use. Sometimes these biases are harmful. One of the trickiest is called In-Group Bias. It means that we trust people who seem to be in the same group as us—for example those who look like us, or talk with the same accent, or have the same gender identity. Unfortunately, without meaning to, we can feel suspicious of others not like us, and sometimes we end up unfairly excluding others or being excluded ourselves. What do you notice about the groups in your school? Who tends to be in each, and is there any exclusion or bias you see happening? How could you change things?

Additional Resources

One way to catch in-group bias is to find a time when you place a label on a group, OR when it seems like it's "ok to make fun of" a certain group. For example, Americans making fun of a French accent, as often happens in popular media. Or when one person labels another group, for example saying "girls are all ____" or labeling groups based on age, race, or other factors. These are big warning signs that in-group bias is at play. This bias leads us to think that our group's behaviors are reasonable and natural, even when they are not predictable or consistent, whereas the other group's behaviors are "all the same" and not necessarily in a good way.

For further exploration, if a group gets into the idea of catching our own biases, check out the Codex of Cognitive Bias, a visual explanation of the 180+ documented human biases (more being added all the time!).