Tight Times May Change Our Perceptions of Who ‘Belongs’

From the playground to the office, a key aspect of our social lives involves figuring out who “belongs” and who doesn’t. Our biases lead us — whether we’re aware of it or not — to favor people who belong to our own social group. Scientists theorize that these prevalent in-group biases may give us a competitive advantage against others, especially when important resources are limited.

Psychological scientist Christopher Rodeheffer and his colleagues at Texas Christian University wanted to examine whether resource scarcity might actually lead us to change our definition of who belongs to our social group. Their new research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.