In group favouritism
Ενδοομαδική μεροληψία
The tendency to favour your own group over another in your judgements and your decisions, which appears even when the two groups have nothing to compete over. It follows that settling the issue does not settle the relationship, because the issue is not what produced the line.
How to spot it
Ask yourself one question about the proposal in front of you: if this exact sentence had come from my side, would it look the same to me?
The research behind the term
The term is not our invention. It comes from published research, and what follows is what that research found — our own synthesis of the published abstract, not a translation of the original.
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict — πηγή
What it found
- The laboratory analogue of ethnocentrism is in-group bias: the tendency to favor our own group over the other, in evaluations as well as in behavior.
- Incompatible interests are not always enough to generate conflict.
- There is considerable experimental evidence that incompatible interests are not even necessary: competition and discrimination between groups develop without them.
How it found it
A theoretical chapter in an edited volume, starting from experimental studies of intergroup behavior; it sets out social identity theory. The 1979 volume is out of print, so the link goes to the WorldCat record (see the link policy at the top of the file).
What it means for conflict management
If the bias precedes the disagreement, settling the issue does not settle the relationship: what has to change is where the group line is drawn.
Sources
Every claim on this page maps to published research. The citations link to the original source.
- Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict — Source on search.worldcat.org