Ingroup favoritism operates through reward-giving rather than outgroup harm

Evidence

The tendency to overgeneralize the typical minimal group findings does not mitigate the central result, but it certainly forestalls more comprehensive understanding. It seems that the in-group = deserving and out-group = unworthy interpretation owes, in part, to the use of research designs that have focused determinately and exclusively on the distribution of positive outcomes to in-group or out-group members in the minimal group paradigm for, indeed, the great majority of minimal group studies have used the allocation of positive rewards as the critical outcome variable, despite warnings about the threats to generalizability that such mindless consistency entails … What happens when in-group members must allocate negative outcomes? Even in the absence of data, it seems reasonable to assume that when outcome valences change, distributional tendencies may be altered as well. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1379

Categorization

• SEED: A literature-critique angle: classical discrimination experiments overwhelmingly used reward allocation, so documented intergroup bias may be an artifact of valence choice rather than prejudice itself.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: did this reward-only design bias also contaminate Allport-era and later audit/field studies of real-world discrimination?
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1379
• XREF: connects to: Leaders gain support by favoring ingroup members over even-handedness — Stephen Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam, and Nick Hopkins, Social identity and the dynamics of…, 49