Abstract
Across seven experiments and one survey (n = 4,282), people consistently overestimated out-group negativity towards the collective behaviour of their in-group. This negativity bias in group meta-perception was present across multiple competitive (but not cooperative) intergroup contexts and appears to be yoked to group psychology more generally; we observed negativity bias for estimation of out-group, anonymized-group and even fellow in-group members’ perceptions. Importantly, in the context of US politics, greater inaccuracy was associated with increased belief that the out-group is motivated by purposeful obstructionism. However, an intervention that informed participants of the inaccuracy of their beliefs reduced negative out-group attributions, and was more effective for those whose group meta-perceptions were more inaccurate. In sum, we highlight a pernicious bias in social judgements of how we believe ‘they’ see ‘our’ behaviour, demonstrate how such inaccurate beliefs can exacerbate intergroup conflict and provide an avenue for reducing the negative effects of inaccuracy.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
$29.99 / 30 days
cancel any time
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 digital issues and online access to articles
$119.00 per year
only $9.92 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
All data that supported the findings of this study are publicly available in CSV format on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/zhysa/.
Code availability
All analyses reported in this study used the statistical software R (v.3.6.1). All R files are publicly available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/zhysa/.
References
Carlson, E. N. Meta-accuracy and relationship quality: weighing the costs and benefits of knowing what people really think about you. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 111, 250–264 (2016).
Carlson, E. N., Vazire, S. & Furr, R. M. Meta-insight: do people really know how others see them? J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 101, 831–846 (2011).
Vazire, S. & Carlson, E. N. Others sometimes know us better than we know ourselves. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 20, 104–108 (2011).
Vorauer, J. D., Main, K. J. & O’Connell, G. B. How do individuals expect to be viewed by members of lower status groups? Content and implications of meta-stereotypes. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 75, 21 (1998).
Vorauer, J. D., Hunter, A. J., Main, K. J. & Roy, S. A. Meta-stereotype activation: evidence from indirect measures for specific evaluative concerns experienced by members of dominant groups in intergroup interaction. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 78, 690–707 (2000).
Frey, F. E. & Tropp, L. R. Being seen as individuals versus as group members: extending research on metaperception to intergroup contexts. Personal. Soc. Psychol. Rev. 10, 265–280 (2006).
Kteily, N., Hodson, G. & Bruneau, E. They see us as less than human: metadehumanization predicts intergroup conflict via reciprocal dehumanization. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 110, 343–370 (2016).
Sigelman, L. & Tuch, S. A. Metastereotypes: blacks’ perceptions of whites’ stereotypes of blacks. Public Opin. Q. 61, 87 (1997).
Finchilescu, G. Intergroup anxiety in interracial interaction: the role of prejudice and metastereotypes. J. Soc. Issues 66, 334–351 (2010).
Klein, O. & Azzi, A. E. The strategic confirmation of meta-stereotypes: how group members attempt to tailor an out-group’s representation of themselves. Br. J. Soc. Psychol. 40, 279–293 (2001).
Waytz, A., Young, L. L. & Ginges, J. Motive attribution asymmetry for love vs. hate drives intractable conflict. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, 15687–15692 (2014).
Lau, T., Morewedge, C. K. & Cikara, M. Overcorrection for social-categorization information moderates impact bias in affective forecasting. Psychol. Sci. 27, 1340–1351 (2016).
Goldstein, N. J., Vezich, I. S. & Shapiro, J. R. Perceived perspective taking: when others walk in our shoes. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 106, 941–960 (2014).
Saguy, T. & Kteily, N. Inside the opponent’s head: perceived losses in group position predict accuracy in metaperceptions between groups. Psychol. Sci. 22, 951–958 (2011).
Robinson, R. J., Keltner, D., Ward, A. & Ross, L. Actual versus assumed differences in construal: ‘Naive realism’ in intergroup perception and conflict. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 68, 404–417 (1995).
Chambers, J. R. & Melnyk, D. Why do I hate thee? Conflict misperceptions and intergroup mistrust. Personal. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 32, 1295–1311 (2006).
Chambers, J. R., Baron, R. S. & Inman, M. L. Misperceptions in intergroup conflict. Psychol. Sci. 17, 38–45 (2006).
Westfall, J., Van Boven, L., Chambers, J. R. & Judd, C. M. Perceiving political polarization in the United States: party identity strength and attitude extremity exacerbate the perceived partisan divide. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 10, 145–158 (2015).
Bush, G. W. President Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress and the nation. The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html (20 September 2001).
Sunstein, C. R. Why they hate us: The role of social dynamics. Harvard J. Law Public Policy 25, 429–440 (2002).
Zakaria, F. The politics of rage: why do they hate us? Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/politics-rage-why-do-they-hate-us-154345 (14 October 2001).
Merskin, D. The construction of Arabs as enemies: post-September 11 discourse of George W. Bush. Mass Commun. Soc. 7, 157–175 (2004).
Rogers, T. & Feller, A. Reducing student absences at scale by targeting parents’ misbeliefs. Nat. Hum. Behav. 2, 335–342 (2018).
Nyhan, B. & Reifler, J. The roles of information deficits and identity threat in the prevalence of misperceptions. J. Elect. Public Opin. Parties 29, 1–23 (2018).
Eisenkraft, N., Elfenbein, H. A. & Kopelman, S. We know who likes us, but not who competes against us:dyadic meta-accuracy among work colleagues. Psychol. Sci. 28, 233–241 (2017).
Reeder, G. D., Vonk, R., Ronk, M. J., Ham, J. & Lawrence, M. Dispositional attribution: multiple inferences about motive-related traits. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 86, 530–544 (2004).
Miller, D. T. & Nelson, L. D. Seeing approach motivation in the avoidance behavior of others: implications for an understanding of pluralistic ignorance. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 83, 1066–1075 (2002).
Insko, C. A., Schopler, J., Hoyle, R. H., Dardis, G. J. & Graetz, K. A. Individual-group discontinuity as a function of fear and greed. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 58, 68–79 (1990).
Wildschut, T., Pinter, B., Vevea, J. L., Insko, C. A. & Schopler, J. Beyond the group mind: a quantitative review of the interindividual-intergroup discontinuity effect. Psychol. Bull. 129, 698–722 (2003).
Pemberton, M. B., Insko, C. A. & Schopler, J. Memory for and experience of differential competitive behavior of individuals and groups. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 71, 14 (1996).
Enders, A. M. & Armaly, M. T. The differential effects of actual and perceived polarization. Polit. Behav. 41, 815–839 (2018).
Carlson, E. N., Furr, R. M. & Vazire, S. Do we know the first impressions we make? Evidence for idiographic meta-accuracy and calibration of first impressions. Soc. Psychol. Personal. Sci. 1, 94–98 (2010).
Stern, C. & Kleiman, T. Know thy outgroup: promoting accurate judgments of political attitude differences through a conflict mindset. Soc. Psychol. Personal. Sci. 6, 950–958 (2015).
Stroessner, S. J. & Dweck, C. S. in Social Perception: From Individuals to Groups (eds Stroessner, S. J. & Sherman, J. W.) 177–196 (Psychology Press, 2015).
Ames, D. & Fiske, S. Perceived intent motivates people to magnify observed harms. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 112, 3599–3605 (2015).
Goldenberg, A., Saguy, T. & Halperin, E. How group-based emotions are shaped by collective emotions: evidence for emotional transfer and emotional burden. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 107, 581–596 (2014).
Schönbrodt, F. D. & Perugini, M. At what sample size do correlations stabilize? J. Res. Personal. 47, 609–612 (2013).
Brooks, M. et al. glmmTMB balances speed and flexibility among packages for zero-inflated generalized linear mixed modeling. R J. 9, 378–400 (2017).
Kuznetsova, A., Brockhoff, P. B. & Christensen, R. H. B. lmerTest package: Tests in linear mixed effects models. J. Stat. Softw. 82, 1–26 (2017).
Lenth, R. emmeans: Estimated marginal means, aka least-squares means. R package version 1.4. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=emmeans (2019).
Smithson, M. & Verkuilen, J. A better lemon squeezer? Maximum-likelihood regression with beta-distributed dependent variables. Psychol. Methods 11, 54–71 (2006).
Patil, I. & Powell, C. ggstatsplot: “ggplot2” based plots with statistical details. R package version 0.0.12. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ggstatsplot (2018).
Lüdecke, D. sjPlot: Data visualization for statistics in social science. R package version 2.7.0. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=sjPlot (2019).
Revelle, W. psych: Procedures for psychological, psychometric, and personality research. R Package version 1.8.12. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=psych (2018).
Acknowledgements
Work on this project by M.C. was supported by a National Science Foundation Award (no. BCS-1551559). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. We thank members of the Harvard Intergroup Neuroscience Lab, Sidanius Lab and attendees at the 2018 East Coast Doctoral Conference for their helpful comments, Z. Ingbretsen and N. Hunt for help with data collection and I. Zahn and S. Worthington for statistical assistance.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
J.L. and M.C. designed all experiments and wrote the manuscript. J.L. completed data collection and analysis under the supervision of M.C.
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Peer review information Primary handling editor: Aisha Bradshaw
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary notes, figures, tables, methods and analysis.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lees, J., Cikara, M. Inaccurate group meta-perceptions drive negative out-group attributions in competitive contexts. Nat Hum Behav 4, 279–286 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0766-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0766-4
This article is cited by
-
Cross-partisan discussions reduced political polarization between UK voters, but less so when they disagreed
Communications Psychology (2024)
-
Zero-sum beliefs and the avoidance of political conversations
Communications Psychology (2024)
-
Why voters who value democracy participate in democratic backsliding
Nature Human Behaviour (2023)
-
Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility
Nature Human Behaviour (2023)
-
Exposure to a media intervention helps promote support for peace in Colombia
Nature Human Behaviour (2022)