In diversifying societies, people are inevitably exposed to an increasing number of outgroups. As impressions of outgroups are more negative than those of ingroups, this may overall lead to more negative social attitudes and behaviors. In six preregistered experiments ( = 1832) using a minimal group paradigm, we investigated whether the mere number of groups influences the perceived trustworthiness of ingroups, outgroups, and the total population. Our results consistently show that higher diversity does not decrease overall population trustworthiness, despite a larger number of outgroups. This is because of a stronger intergroup bias such that ingroups receive an additional boost in trustworthiness judgments when there are more outgroups. Our experiments show that these effects are not due to objective or perceived group sizes or greater attitude differences toward the group-defining attributes. Instead, people seem to perceive members of their ingroup as more similar to themselves if there is a higher number of outgroups and high similarity is related to high perceived trustworthiness.

中文翻译：

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少数或许多极小群体中感知可信度的群体间偏见


在多元化的社会中，人们不可避免地会接触到越来越多的外群体。由于对外群体的印象比内群体的印象更负面，这可能总体上导致更负面的社会态度和行为。在使用最小群体范式的六个预先注册的实验（= 1832）中，我们研究了群体数量是否会影响内群体、外群体和总人口的感知可信度。我们的结果一致表明，尽管外群体数量较多，但较高的多样性并不会降低总体人群的可信度。这是因为更强烈的群体间偏见，当有更多的外群体时，内群体的可信度判断会得到额外的提升。我们的实验表明，这些影响并不是由于客观或感知的群体规模或对群体定义属性的更大态度差异造成的。相反，如果外群体数量较多，人们似乎会认为内群体成员与自己更加相似，并且高相似性与高感知可信度相关。