Love-prejudice toward one’s ingroup is more basic to human life than outgroup hate

Evidence

Allport (1954/1979) also pin-pointed the function of ingroup and outgroup categorization, observing that “the category enables us quickly to identify a related object” (p. 21). With respect to the importance of ingroup identification and how it may be more fundamental to intergroup bias than even outgroup antipathy, Allport remarked that “there is good reason to believe that this love-prejudice is far more basic to human life than is … hate-prejudice. When a person is defending a categorical value of his own, he may do so at the expense of other people’s interests or safety. Hate prejudice springs from a reciprocal love prejudice underneath” (pp. 25–6). — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 536

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Allport’s claim that hate-prejudice rides on love-prejudice inverts the standard framing and is a genuinely novel inversion worth sitting with.
• XREF: Connects to the idea in ‘We’ and dystopian literature that devotion to one’s own collective enables cruelty to outsiders. — connects to: the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: Ours, True, and the Identity That Defends Both”
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 536