What is it about?
When someone outside our group offers help, we often assume the worst about their motives, even though we would readily trust the same gesture from one of our own. This research examined whether the beliefs we hold about our own group's tolerance can change that pattern. Across four experiments with over 800 participants from the US, Kosovo Serbs, and Kosovo Albanians, people consistently attributed less empathy and fewer genuine motives to a helper from an outgroup compared to an ingroup helper, and were less willing to accept their help. But when participants learned that their own group held tolerant attitudes toward the outgroup, this bias weakened or disappeared entirely. In the final experiment, tolerant norms also increased willingness to seek future contact with the outgroup. The mechanism worked in sequence: tolerant norms shifted what people expected their own group members to think, which changed how they read the helper's motives, which changed how they expected the interaction to feel, which ultimately shaped whether they accepted the help and wanted future contact.
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Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Helping across group lines is often proposed as a way to build trust and ease tension between groups, but this research shows that the same act of help can be read very differently depending on the social climate around it. A helping hand from an outgroup member is not automatically seen as kind. It can be read as having ulterior motives unless people believe their own community is open to the outgroup in the first place. This matters directly for peacebuilding and integration efforts: programmes that encourage cross-group contact or assistance may fall short if they ignore the surrounding norms. The findings point to a practical lesson, namely that shifting perceived ingroup attitudes, even through something as simple as showing survey results about tolerance, can unlock the benefits of positive intergroup contact that would otherwise go unrealised.
Perspectives
This project began with a puzzle that kept surfacing in my earlier work on intergroup help: why does the same act of kindness get interpreted so differently depending on who offers it. Running these studies across three very different cultural and political contexts, including the tense Kosovo-Serbia relationship, made clear that the answer was not really about the helper at all. It was about what people believed their own group thought. That shift in focus, from the outgroup's intentions to the ingroup's norms, changed how I think about designing interventions for intergroup contact more broadly.
Dr Islam Borinca
National University of Ireland Maynooth
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Ingroup norms shape understanding of outgroup prosocial behaviors, Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, April 2021, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1368430220987604.
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