There’s a term getting a lot of attention lately – in Italian, «amichettismo» – to describe the tendency to choose or reward people not for their merit but simply because they belong to our own circle. It might sound like an issue tied to public appointments, but social psychology tells us this inclination runs far deeper and is far more universal than we might think, and it concerns all of us, not just people in positions of power.
In the 1970s, psychologist Henri Tajfel wanted to find out how little it would take to spark favoritism toward one’s own group. He split young participants into two teams based on a completely arbitrary criterion – for instance, a preference for paintings by Klee over Kandinsky, a detail with no real connection to their lives. The participants didn’t know each other, had never interacted, and knew perfectly well they’d been split almost at random. Yet when asked to distribute small sums of money between members of the two groups, most systematically chose to favor their own team, even when that meant giving up a larger overall gain for everyone. Tajfel published these findings in 1970 in Scientific American, in an article that became a classic of social psychology: a label, however meaningless, was enough to activate a sense of belonging strong enough to steer people’s decisions.
What makes this experiment so striking isn’t the discovery that favoritism exists, but how little it takes to trigger it. There’s no need to know someone well, share a history, or feel any real bond – the simple perception of being «on the same side» is enough. It’s the same mechanism that, on a larger scale, leads someone to pick a colleague for a project because «they’re one of us», or to trust people who move in the same circles more easily, even when skill has nothing to do with it.
Recognizing this bias doesn’t mean giving up trust in the people close to us, or treating acquaintances coldly. It means pausing, before a decision that matters – a hire, an assignment, a vote of confidence – and asking whether that choice is really based on merit, or simply on the feeling that this person is «one of us». Being aware of this automatic reflex is already a first step toward making it less automatic, and toward leaving more room for those who deserve it, even when they’re not part of our group.
Sources
Tajfel, H. (1970). Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination. Scientific American, 223(5), 96-103.
Follow me on social media
If you found this article helpful, I share content like this every day on my channels too. Subscribe and follow along:
Lascia un commento