A role for self-regulatory control in the absence of ingroup preference

One of psychology’s most ubiquitous findings is that of robust ingroup preference, an explicitly stated human preference for the groups to which we belong. The advent of implicit measures of social cognition introduced a paradoxical result: Compared to members of higher-status groups, members of lower-status groups often show no implicit ingroup preference, sometimes even showing outgroup preference, a result rarely observed on explicit measures. Prevailing theories have provided macro-level accounts, often in terms of system-justifying tendencies, but the various cognitive processes that could produce such an absence of ingroup preference among lower-status groups have not been directly decomposed. In this paper, we address this gap via formal process modeling applied to data from 5.7 million respondents collected across 16 years and 6 social categories. We find that, among lower-status groups, ingroup-affirming evaluations are accompanied by more pronounced self-regulatory control than outgroup-affirming evaluations, a regulatory asymmetry absent among higher-status groups. For example, evaluations affirming Black and overweight ingroups were accompanied by heightened self-regulatory control, whereas a comparable self-regulatory pattern was not observed for evaluations affirming White and nonoverweight ingroups. The evidence points to a previously unrecognized role for self-regulatory control in the absence of ingroup preference, suggesting that the cognitive imprint of social hierarchies may extend beyond evaluative associations to the regulatory processes that govern their expression.