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I've been doing some research into in-group bias and race and have been finding some fairly interesting results.
Let's start with a well known piece of evidence which is often used in the culture war. This article uses ANES 2018 Pilot Survey data regarding racial in-group and out-group biases, and shows the average differences in feelings of warmth (measured along a 0-100 scale) toward whites vs. nonwhites (i.e., Asians, Hispanics, and blacks) across different subgroups.
Here is the first relevant graph from the article. According to the article, the only subgroup that has an outgroup bias is white liberals (having an outgroup bias of 13 points). Even among white non-liberals, their in-group bias (11.62) is less than that of your average black person (15.58), Hispanic (12.83), or Asian person (13.84). Granted, the differences there can be argued to be pretty marginal in size, but if you take into account the outgroup bias of white liberals it would almost certainly make it so that whites' in-group biases are quite a bit lower than that of other races, and it flies in the face of the idea that whites are any more tribal than other races.
Here is the second relevant graph showing the biases of all the subgroups of whites. Those who are "very liberal" have an outgroup bias of a whopping 19.45 points, while liberals have an outgroup bias of 8.56 points. Moderates have an in-group bias of 9.42 points, conservatives have an in-group bias of 11.51 points, and very conservative whites have an in-group bias of 15.62 points. Very conservative whites have an in-group bias that's only as strong as that of your average black person.
This finding of an average lower in-group bias among whites isn't just an isolated anomaly. On L.J Zigerell's blog, he presents data reporting the mean ratings of races from Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians of Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, using data from the preliminary release of the 2020 ANES Time Series Study.
You can easily see from the graph in the blog post that whites' mean ratings of whites are not much different from their ratings of blacks, Hispanics and Asians. For all the other racial groups, their mean ratings of their own races are far higher than any other race. Every racial group other than whites also all rank whites the lowest out of the four racial groups.
Additionally, in another blog post he presents data from the 2020 ANES Social Media Study detailing racial feeling thermometer responses. Respondents ranked each race based on how warm, cold or neutral they were towards them, and the findings are in line with the previous results.
In the blog post, this graph compares the race evaluations of white respondents with black respondents. Among whites, the percentage of those giving warm ratings towards whites is only very slightly higher than the percentage of those giving warm ratings towards blacks and Asians. Among blacks, the percentage of those who give warm ratings towards whites (and Asians) is markedly lower than the percentage of those giving warm ratings towards blacks. This graph compares the race evaluations of white born again Trump voters with black respondents, and surprisingly, the pattern of whites being less biased in favour of their own race than blacks still holds (albeit less strongly).
The relative lack of white in-group bias found might seem surprising, but it is not only found in ANES - it is also in line with some other work. This study "reports results from a new analysis of 17 survey experiment studies that permitted assessment of racial discrimination, drawn from the archives of the Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences. For White participants (n=10 435), pooled results did not detect a net discrimination for or against White targets, but, for Black participants (n=2781), pooled results indicated the presence of a small-to-moderate net discrimination in favor of Black targets; inferences were the same for the subset of studies that had a political candidate target and the subset of studies that had a worker or job applicant target."
Anecdotally, I can say that these results do jive very well with my own experience - whites are as a group less likely to place primacy on race and are also less likely to classify themselves as a group with united interests.
Whites aren't really a coherent in-group for a lot of white people. Because whites are the majority, it largely doesn't make sense in my day to day life to treat whites as a unitary group with united interests, to see another white person and say "Oh, we'll have much more in common." My actual in-group may contain a different racial mix than the overall population, and inasmuch as it does my biases will be different.
Personal example, my very large high school was 90% white; but because I was an AP kid the small classes I was in were basically 60% white and 40% Asian/Indian. So if the only thing you tell me about someone is their race, telling me they are white doesn't really indicate that we'll have more in common than the average student and we probably had no classes together (the white kid might be my best friend, or he might be a votech kid or a burnout stoner kid or a football player); telling me they are Indian meant there was a better than 75% chance we had a class together and mutual friends.
So imagine I'm a white liberal who considers their ingroup "Democratic Voters." In most states the majority of Dem voters are white; at the same time minority voters are much more likely to be Democrats while whites are more evenly split. So even though the majority of my in-group is white, if I see a white person it's a coinflip if they are in my in group; meanwhile if I see a Black person they are 87%, overwhelmingly likely, to be in my in group.
Interesting. But it seems clear that any such reasoning based on group differences could be applied both ways regardless of numerical majority/minority status. Even if whites are a numerical majority and see their own race as being the norm, when they see a non-white person their reaction could be "We'll have much less in common" due to a lack of shared background. The same cultural differences that could be the driver of a strong in-group bias among non-whites also has the potential to create a strong in-group bias among whites, however, in practice it doesn't seem to occur to the same extent considering whites' lower in-group biases.
Then there's also the fact that there's plenty of countries where the racial and ethnic majority seems (at least on a surface level) to be quite a good bit more tribal than those in the West (e.g. Japan), so clearly being a numerical majority doesn't preclude a group from having a strong sense of unity.
The explanation I'm leaning towards at the moment is that there's some external factor tempering the in-group biases of whites and/or exacerbating the in-group biases of non-whites, and people being raised with woke ideology does seem to be a plausible candidate. I think it's beyond the realm of possibility that being repeatedly exposed to these types of ideas doesn't end up affecting real-world perception and behaviour.
We don't get the chance to because the graph gives us "Blacks" and "Hispanics" without giving us "Conservative Blacks" and "Evangelical Hispanics" etc. Only whites are broken down by politics. A lot of commenters don't even notice the sleight of hand, because it makes intuitive sense: whites come in all kinds of varieties, while minorities are expected to meet the basic template for their group. Electioneers worry about working class whites and college educated whites and evangelical whites and urban whites, but when they talk about Blacks they just talk about Blacks. And to a certain extent that is accurate!
To my knowledge, correct me if I'm wrong, there are no politically important ethnic minorities in Japan, so it's not the same game. But in my town, I wouldn't see another white person and think "oh we'll have a lot in common" any more than any other person on the street, because 80% of them are white. In Japan, it would be the opposite, any white person would be likely to have much more in common with me than the average person on the street.
But a white liberal in my town, if they see a white person and a Black person, and they want to talk to the person who is likely to have voted the same way they did in the last election, they should obviously talk to the Black person. They are 87% likely to have voted for Biden. The white guy is just as likely to have voted for Trump as for Biden.
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the audacity to immigrate to a country and hate the people who built it and let you in...
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Are all these studies only about explicitly asking people about these things? Because then you don't measure who has in-group bias but who says that they have it. Maybe whites overall have been told more over childhood an later life that being a good person requires not having racial biases and when filling out surveys people may (perhaps subconsciously) not describe themselves but instead their good-person-ideal, or what they know they should be. Self knowledge is hard.
I'd be more convinced by studies that somehow measure people's behavior in the real world (I don't know, hiring stats or something, as an example) instead of just asking questions on paper.
I’m partial to this explanation.
Given our culture and the fact we’re all brought up learning about the history of racism, civil rights, etc., it makes sense that a white person would be very conditioned against responding something like “yes I feel unfavorable towards black people” on a questionnaire. I feel icky even writing that sentence, for example.
But, that’s just a questionnaire. Look at who people hang out with in their daily life. Look at how in schools people tend to group up based on self-similarity. Look at the research on innate biases, like those studies measuring threat response while looking at pictures of a white person vs a black person.
There very well may be unconscious in-group preference that doesn’t get captured by these methods.
I'm quite aware that the studies I linked about explicit measures of racial bias are not the end of the story, it wasn't meant to be a comprehensive assessment of the literature. I simply wanted to post some interesting results most of which haven't attracted much mainstream attention (probably because "whites at the moment have less in-group bias than other races" contradicts the popular view). And I will say that a good portion of the experiments covered in my final link - which on the whole found no in-group biases among whites, but did find in-group biases among blacks - did not seem to directly ask people about their racial perceptions, instead many of them attempted to more covertly assess biases by manipulating characteristics of the target (e.g. showing a photograph of a black person instead of a white person, or using the name "Jamal" instead of "Greg").
In any case I think it's very possible to reconcile racial grouping-up behaviours with the findings I posted, since whites on aggregate still do have a slight in-group bias according to a good bunch of the data (albeit one that's quite a good bit smaller than that of other races, as Zach Goldberg demonstrates in his twitter thread here), and even assuming a complete lack of any white in-group bias the strong in-group biases found in non-whites could create the same outcome of racial self-segregation. Additionally, it should also be entertained that other attributes that happen to correlate with race such as cultural similarity could be what is driving the grouping-up behaviours.
I'd also add that many of the innate/unconscious bias studies on race certainly have their own problems. As an example, the innate bias measure which has garnered the most attention in the mainstream is the Implicit Association Test, or the IAT, and it has been used to demonstrate the existence of omnipresent implicit racism. It is based on differential response times to pairing a certain race with positively or negatively coded words and it is a very questionable measure at best. To start, here and here are articles with dozens of citations overviewing the plethora of problems with the IAT. There's a lot of evidence debunking it as a scientifically and psychometrically acceptable test, and the creators of the test themselves have been very inconsistent in their statements on the topic of whether the IAT can actually predict behaviour or not.
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But this still constitutes a real signal, doesn't it? The guidelines imparted by society generally do not have explicit racial clauses in them. While open racial camaraderie or preferences are often tolerated if done by non-whites the general societal script still prescribes universal tolerance, politeness and equality of opportunity, and this is taught to children of all backgrounds. That whites are the only ones to publicly commit to that (even if they don't live up to the ideal) is still something.
In the context of outgroup-ingroup bias that raises the question of how to account for society-wide behavior. While it might be the case that white business owners hire people with the surname "Zapata" (or "Abadi" if we're talking about Europe) less often than people named "Anderson", how would such a study account for the fact that it's rather uniquely societies like the ones that brought forth these white business owners that allow a situation such that there are millions of Zapatas, many of them equipped with citizenship, available to be hired in the first place.
Maybe whites unconsciously or consciously feel more powerful and feel that they need more conscious high-brain-levels restraint on their animal instincts. A bit like how a strong large man needs to learn to control himself because he can inflict real damage, while a small woman lashing out is seen as harmless and maybe even endearing and cute/funny. Meaning, when non-whites do some in-group biased thing, whites may think it cannot have any consequence, it's just like a lion cub doing some cute roaring. But when whites get into that style of thinking it leads to very professionally and industrially-scientifically orchestrated and engineered genocide, like the Holocaust.
In other words it could be a paternalistic attitude. That a white person must know better or something, while non whites don't quite grasp it yet and anyways don't have the necessary power to do too much damage so just let them play.
I wouldn't attribute the entirety of the gender effect found to this factor quite so quickly. Respondents condemn violence by men against women more harshly than violence by women against men, and this disparity persists even after controlling for perceptions of greater injury of women. "Our findings suggest that real or perceived differences in injury or potential for injury provide some explanation behind differences in attitudes regarding domestic violence across perpetrator or victim gender, but it does not fully explain this difference. Rather, across all three measures, respondents evaluated violence by men against women more seriously than they did violence by women against men. We find that third parties (a) rated men’s violence as more injurious, (b) were more likely to label men’s violence as a crime even after controlling for injury rating, and (c) deemed men’s violence as more worthy of police contact, controlling for injury rating and criminal labeling."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15564886.2017.1340383
When it comes to male/female relations, a good amount of the prioritisation of female safety (and the cultural norms regulating male behaviour around them) are likely influenced by factors unrelated to a simple evaluation of women as being physically at risk. I believe we view harm done to women as inherently objectionable on a more fundamental level and reflects an underlying "empathy gap" of sorts.
For example, this paper notes that "Gender differences were investigated in the experience of empathic sadness towards same- versus other-sex targets. ... In both studies, female adolescents reported more empathic sadness than did male adolescents. Female targets also received more affective empathy than did male targets, and, more importantly, gender differences were observed in same-sex versus other-sex affective empathy." They also note that the finding of female targets receiving more empathy, especially from male adolescents, is consistent with previous research.
I actually do believe that this could be true to some extent regarding race (which is evident whenever white liberals talk repeatedly about prejudice + power as a reason why only whites can be racist). That really doesn't change the fact that the tolerance for prejudice when non-whites do it is a benefit offered to non-whites.
By acting as a powerless victim that is only ever downtrodden by society, it is possible to gain help and provision on an individual level, as well as to game society to get financial, professional and social benefits, which is why you see so many non-whites and women and [insert other protected class here] capitalising on the very social justice narratives that paint them as having little power. It's notable that all of those complaining about being "looked down upon" continue reinforcing that narrative themselves through repeated claims of victimhood instead of asserting one's agency.
I am not of the opinion that it is inherently beneficial to be seen as powerful, or that it is a perception that you necessarily want (which is an assumption inherent in the comment you wrote). In all honesty, I think the less power you can convince people that you have, the more benefits you can actually milk from society at large. There are a huge amount of incentives to seek out a perception of yourself as weak, and in fact that is indeed what you see people willingly doing for themselves now - trying to attach the weak, abused victim role to themselves to exploit double standards and place greater responsibility on their out-group while dressing it all up in the guise of empowerment.
If it was truly so undesirable to be viewed in that way, you probably wouldn't be seeing the proliferation of these kinds of woke movements en masse.
Could this be linked to the Women are Wonderful effect?
Man hits woman: she almost certainly did not deserve it, Women are Wonderful
Man hits man: who knows, maybe he deserved it? Men can be so cruel.
Woman hits woman: probably a misunderstanding that could be resolved if they would talk and their mutual Wonderfulness was apparent to each
Woman hits man: since Women are Wonderful, he probably did something really bad to deserve it
Like all stereotypes, there is some truth in this and some falsity. It's true that almost all women are unconfrontational and need a lot of provocation to be violence. However, it's also true that almost all men are that way too! Only a small minority of men tend to be violent with little justification. But, as usual in relations between the sexes, minority groups seem to have a disproportionate impact on people's cognition.
There could definitely be some relation, the Women are Wonderful effect itself is a pretty substantiated finding after all (source 1, source 2 for proof) and it's plausible that it has an effect.
And I would agree that the mindset you've outlined ("well, he must have done something to deserve it") is very common.
Yeah I wouldn't say there's much merit to the stereotype at all. It's actually very possible to flip the argument in the other direction and state that since people are generally averse to hurting women in the first place, if they do so, there probably must be some reason why (note that I do not endorse the adoption of this attitude whatsoever, this is just an argument to show how easily this logic can be flipped on its head).
Regardless of whether behaviours that are protective of women are instinctual or sociocultural (as previously stated I lean heavily towards the former having at least some impact), the unwillingness to hurt women can't just be chalked up to being an artefact of socially desirable responding, since it is also verifiable in experimental, real-world contexts.
The article "Moral Chivalry: Gender and Harm Sensitivity Predict Costly Altruism" details a few small studies concerning the topic. Study 2 is probably the most interesting of the studies to me, because it moves out of the realm of the hypothetical and into an actual experimental situation where participants actually believed people were being hurt. They gave participants 20 dollars, and told them that at the end of the experiment the money they still had would be multiplied by ten-fold. However, they'd have to go through 20 trials where a person would be shocked, and during each trial they could opt to give up an amount of money in order to reduce the shock the target received. They were broadcasted videos of either a male target (Condition 1) or female target (Condition 2) responding to the shock, and the results were:
"During the PvG task, deciders interacting with a female target kept significantly less money and thus gave significantly lower shocks (n = 34; £8.76/£20, SD ± 5.0) than deciders interacting with a male target, n = 23; £12.54/£20, SD ± 3.9; independent samples t-test: t(55) = −3.16, p = .003, Cohen’s d = .82; Figure 2B. This replicates the findings from Studies 1A and 1B in the real domain and under a different class of moral challenge, illustrating that harm endorsement is attenuated for female targets." Note also that the videos broadcasted were prerated by an independent group to be matched across condition, such that both male and female targets elicited similar body and facial pain expressions.
Male robbers downright express a reluctance to target women. "Overall, the men in our sample tended not to target women, or, if they did, they did not admit it. Overwhelmingly, the cases discussed here involved men robbing men or men robbing male/female couples; in the latter case, the robbers focused their discussions on gaining the males 'compliance, not the females'. ... Mark described robbing two females under the influence of an alcohol/valium cocktail. In the interview, he expressed considerable shame for his actions: 'I robbed a girl as well so it makes it so much worse … I was heartbroken … I gutted her … I don’t do shit like that.’ The other male, Thomas, who robbed a lone female, also said that he was ashamed of having robbed a woman. In fact, he went out of his way to suggest that such activities were not typical of his modus operandi: ‘I never done anything like that before, that’s not really me …. I feel terrible that I robbed that woman so I don’t want to talk about it really … I am so ashamed of myself.’"
"A number of other men in our sample offered up explanations for why one should never rob women. In outlining how he chose targets, Mark2 interjected: 'You must be thinking I have no morals. I wouldn’t go out and rob an old person. I would look for a bloke …. It wouldn’t be right to be robbing women and little kids or anything like that.’ When asked if he had ever robbed a woman, John2 replied: 'Yeah, but not violently … generally I don’t want contact with women because I don’t like to be violent with them … I never hit a woman in my life. ’Then he expressed empathy with the potential female victim: ‘It’s just that if it was my mother or sister … it is all right to nick their bag, but not alright to hit them [women].’ Similar philosophies have been described by male street offenders in United States-based studies (e.g. Mullins 2006 ; Wright and Decker 1997)."
Additionally, this study surveyed a sample of 208 Israeli couples examining their tendencies to escalate aggression in eight hypothetical situations where they were provoked. What they found was: Men’s intended escalation to female partner aggression was lower than women’s escalation to male partner aggression. Men’s escalation to male stranger provocation was higher than women’s escalation to female stranger provocation. Men’s escalation to female stranger provocation was lower than women’s escalation to male stranger provocation.
In other words, men, if anything, are actually less willing to escalate aggression with women than women are with men. The results here are congruent with much domestic violence research where results of gender symmetry and often greater female perpetration are the norm in properly-conducted research.
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IMO what you're seeing is that within America "not white" implies some amount of cultural commonality that isn't there with white Americans (I'm not saying it's always there but it more often is, especially for Black American descendants of slaves.). For all the racial hype American culture war is pretty much a contest between conservative whites and liberal whites. The latter are a minority among white Americans so of course they have a negative in-group bias concerning their own "kind".
Speaking for myself, and we're leaving politics out of this, I as a white working class Southerner have far more in common with my black counterpart here than I do a wealthy white liberal from one of the coasts.
Among the very few things worth watching on SNL in the past 20+ years:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=O7VaXlMvAvk
Part of me suspects that the movement of the US radical left (especially "intellectual" left) from a focus on the working class to a focus on LGBT and race was driven by a terror that, when the revolution came, one of the main consequences would be a redirection of public funding from opera and theatre to the kind of things that are stereotypically working class entertainment, e.g. sports and crude comedies.
I suppose one of the under-emphasized/analyzed aspects of 21st-Century American History has to be the reality-TV-fication of things.
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There's a second part to the story. Whites are clearly pursuing a different strategy. Some might say that Whites are simply more enlightened; that they have learned key moral truths that led to the success of Western civilization. The other interpretation is that the strategy is doomed in the long-run, given that it is exploitable by alien defectors.
Whites will signal by proclaiming how non-racial they are. At any other point in history, this behavior would have been regarded as anti-social and ignorant. But through the alchemy of Hollywood and popular culture, these healthy instincts are denounced as taboo.
I am white and I do not value my race. I value my culture, my morals, and my beliefs. You could say I've abandoned my genes and declared my loyalty to my memes.
Of the available ethnic groups in the US, the ones I most align with are East Asians (particularly Korean and Vietnamese) and Latin Americans. White people seem to either reject the culture I love or embrace a hollow parody of it.
If someone told me whiteness would die out tomorrow but my core values would resurge, I'd go to sleep a very happy man.
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