--- title: Discrimination Is About Loyalty, Not Hostility description: Most cases of recent prejudice stem from preference for the ingroup, not hate for the outgroup canonical: https://time.com/106013/discrimination-loyalty-hostility/ author: Eliana Dockterman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-05-20T15:43:43.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-04-13T08:55:19.860Z og:title: Discrimination Is About Loyalty, Not Hostility og:description: Most cases of recent prejudice stem from preference for the ingroup, not hate for the outgroup og:url: https://time.com/106013/discrimination-loyalty-hostility/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Discrimination Is About Loyalty, Not Hostility twitter:description: Most cases of recent prejudice stem from preference for the ingroup, not hate for the outgroup twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # Sometimes Discrimination Is More About Favoritism Than Hostility, Research Says > Sponsored content. 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Worth Your Time is TIME's culture newsletter, published Tuesdays and Saturdays to 40,000 subscribers as of August 2026. #### Who writes TIME's culture recommendations? Culture editor Eliza Berman writes Worth Your Time, drawing on TIME's critics and culture desk. #### Is Worth Your Time free? Yes. It is a free newsletter available at time.com/newsletters.  by [Eliana Dockterman](https://time.com/author/eliana-dockterman/)  ## Eliana Dockterman Correspondent May 20, 2014 3:43 PM UTC  by [Eliana Dockterman](https://time.com/author/eliana-dockterman/)  ## Eliana Dockterman Correspondent May 20, 2014 3:43 PM UTC Discrimination we see in the United States is more complicated than we might assume, according to [a review of recent research by two psychologists](http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/05/19/favoritism-not-hostility-causes-most-discrimination-says-uw-psychology-professor/). Psychology has traditionally defined discrimination as hostility toward those unlike ourselves (or outgroups), but these psychologists believe that more recent cases of bias in the U.S. likely stem from our tendency to favor people who are like ourselves (or ingroups). Tony Greenwald of the University of Washington and Thomas Pettigrew of the University of California, Santa Cruz reviewed studies on discrimination from the last decade and found that prejudice is often rooted in a preference for similar people, rather than in an intent to cause harm to others. They assert that the majority of cases of discrimination in the U.S. don’t stem from hostile actions like homophobic speech or acts of violence spurred by racist feelings. Instead, unintentional discrimination through favoritism is often the culprit. “This is not to say that prejudice and hostility are not related to outgroup discrimination,” Pettigrew said. “But they are not as central to most discrimination as ingroup favoritism.” And those similar people may not necessarily look like you. “Your ‘ingroup’ involves people that you feel comfortable with, people you identify with,” Greenwald said in a statement. “We usually think first of demographic characteristics like age, race, sex, religion and ethnicity as establishing an ingroup, but there are also ingroups based on occupation, neighborhood and schools attended, among other things. Outgroups are those with whom you don’t identify.” So when an employer is considering two candidates—think of one who grew up with a similar background, went to a similar school and is perhaps the same race, compared with another person who has had completely different life experiences—he’s more likely to hire the candidate with whom he identifies. The discrimination against the second candidate is not necessarily intentional or even conscious, it may be because he favors the candidate more like himself not because he dislikes candidate who isn’t like him. 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