What is it about?

People seem to think different about discriminating between members of their own team and others when it comes to deciding whether to help them. Both inter-individual and intercultural differences matter. We found discrimination in favor of the ingroup in every country of the 20 countries studied. How strongly people discriminated differed between countries: Where societal uncertainty was high, people discriminated more. Individual preferences for helping others (vs. helping oneself) made a difference for how much effort (decision time, fixations) decision makers needed to inform their choices. These preferences also conditioned whether decision makers would look up others' team membership or preferred not to know if they played with an in- or outgroup member. They discriminated more if they wanted to know the other players' team membership. Effects differed across cultures, but we found no systematic explanation for why they did.

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Why is it important?

Many large-scale problems societies face require cooperation across social groups, across teams or across countries. Think: climate change, public health, social inequality. We show that people decide differently whether they want to help, depending on personal and cultural characteristics. To encourage them to help, this means different strategies could be needed for different decision makers.

Perspectives

This article is the result of a big project that we worked on for quite a while. We wanted to see if we could use webcams for research internationally, to be able to test how findings we knew from the lab in Germany would pan out in different social and societal contexts. It showed me that we really need to make space for social differences in how we think about decision processes - we shouldn't just assume that all people make decisions the same way.

Rima-Maria Rahal
Vienna University of Economics and Business

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This page is a summary of: Cognitive processes of ingroup favoritism across 20 countries: An eye-tracking investigation of culture, behavior, and cognition, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2417456122.
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