Even minimal, meaningless group membership triggers ingroup-favoring discrimination in children

Evidence

Identity and status are the centerpiece of Tajfel’s (1978) social-identity theory of discrimination. He demonstrated that young boys’ identification with even a meaningless social category could lead to discrimination (Tajfel, 1970). His explanation for the connection between identification and prejudice centered not on conflict but on the process of social comparison/competition whereby children attempt to attain a positive social identity by enhancing their ingroup status relative to the outgroup. In the “minimal” laboratory context, which intentionally eliminates all social groups, identities, and reactions, other than the ones being studied, identity and discrimination are strongly connected (see Bourhis & Gagnon, 2001). After this research, developmentalists could no longer assume, as Allport did, that group identity is salient, strong, and automatic, and that children understand their group’s social status Developmental stages of prejudice now refer to stages in cognitive development rather than learning stages. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2003

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bolsters and updates the vault’s contact-theory claims: minimal-group findings established that categorization alone, uncorrected by contact, produces bias — a mechanism Allport-era theory missed. — connects to: Mere ingroup membership biases members to deny their group’s causal role in harm — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 298
• ADDENDUM: Grounds the contact-theory thread in the developmental/identity foundation showing why mere presence of outgroup members cannot suffice without positive intergroup contact conditions.
• QUESTION: The tension between minimal-group automatic discrimination and Allport’s assumed salient group identity is worth chasing: what conditions make identity salient versus incidental?