The co-occurrence of ingroup and outgroup prosociality across 121 societies

What is it about?

A common premise in the social and behavioral sciences is that ingroup love goes together with outgroup hate. To test this premise, we studied whether ingroup prosociality goes together with less or more outgroup prosociality. Across six datasets that span multiple domains of prosociality and group distinctions with 743,402 individuals in 121 societies, we find strong and robust evidence for a positive relationship between ingroup and outgroup prosociality. Although people are slightly more prosocial toward their ingroup than the outgroup, those who are prosocial toward the ingroup also tend to be prosocial toward the outgroup

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Photo by Fardin Amar on Unsplash

Photo by Fardin Amar on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Whether ingroup prosociality is positively or negatively related to outgroup prosociality has important implications for interventions to establish prosociality across group boundaries. If ingroup prosociality is negatively associated with outgroup prosociality, an implication is that more prosociality is achieved by making the ingroup as large as possible. Such logic underlies efforts to expand inclusion into ingroups and efforts to establish superordinate groups. While such efforts to expand the ingroup may see more people benefiting from prosociality, they also run the risk of reducing diversity and its associated benefits. Indeed, some have warned against “buying social harmony with dull sameness”. Diversity may be regarded as good in its own right, and it also brings important benefits in terms of innovation and solving complex problems. If ingroup prosociality is positively rather than negatively associated with outgroup prosociality, then prosocial behavior across group boundaries becomes possible without sacrificing diversity—for example, by introducing positive interdependencies between groups or removing negative interdependencies