In Group Bias Essay

The Expression of In-group Bias within Artificial Groups
There is a widespread understanding that humans show bias towards members of their own group over members of other groups in a variety of ways. Ample research has been conducted on this phenomenon through the lens of social identity theory. First developed by Henri Tajfel during the 1970s (as cited in Hogg, 2006), social identity theory describes phenomena such as prejudice, discrimination, intergroup behaviour, group categorization and group polarization. Wetherell (1987) describes group polarization as being an important influence on group behaviour as well as a significant factor leading to segregation between groups. From the perspective of social identity theory, in-group bias is

In their research, Fischer and Derham (2016) theorised that individualistic countries such as Australia would experience a lower level of in-group bias as opposed to collectivist countries such as Japan. This notion stemmed from the ideas of Triandis (as cited in Fischer & Derham, 2016) who suggested that individualistic societies did not consider the group as a priority, and instead favoured a sense of competition and self reliance. However, the study found that in-group bias was expressed across all eighteen societies. Importantly, Fischer and Derham (2016) noticed that the spectrum of individualism and collectivism was only influential under specific group conditions, such as whether the group was separated in real-life or artificially.
Four conditions have been identified as necessary for in-group bias to be expressed: individuals must be subjectively identified as belonging to their in-group and use this sense of identification to define their self concept, the dimension involved in intergroup comparison must be perceived to be important or relevant, the out-group must be seen to be a suitable comparison group and the actual positions of the in-group and out-group on the