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Definition
The evolution of the cognitive architecture humans use to sort themselves into coalitions of us versus them.
Introduction
Considerable attention across the social sciences has been paid to understanding how people categorize individuals into groups and create group identities. Throughout human history, conflict between groups was founded on categorizing relationships into “us” and “them” and social psychologists have long recognized the importance of group membership to human social organization. The “minimal group paradigm,” established as a method for investigating the minimal conditions required for discrimination to occur between groups, has continued to show that even virtually meaningless distinctions between groups, such as shirt color, can trigger a tendency to favor one’s own group over others. It is clear that the ability to readily distinguish between in-groups and out-groups played a key role in our evolutionary...
Keywords
- Create Group Identity
- Parochial Altruism
- Phenotype Matching
- Hunter-gatherer Social Organization
- Male Warrior Hypothesis
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Lynch, R. (2019). In-Group Versus Out-Group. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_157-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_157-1
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