ABSTRACT
Generally, in research and in daily life, there is a tendency for people to favor ingroups over outgroups. This ingroup-outgroup differentiation may be reflected in favorable attitudes, intentions, and behavior toward the ingroup and its members and in negative attitudes, intentions, and behavior to the outgroup and its members. However, ingroup favoritism is not a universal phenomenon (Hinkle & Brown, 1990). Lewin (1948) argued that sometimes members of psychological minority groups, who feel discriminated against by the more powerful, privileged majority in our society, may try to leave their own group because membership in it has become nothing but a burden to them. They may attempt to pass the intergroup boundaries that divide them in an effort to gain more social status, self-worth, and security. Particularly, when they are rejected by the privileged outgroup and despised by members of their own minority group for trying to leave them, these people may end up in a marginal no-man’s land in which they belong to neither group. In this marginal situation such people may use the unfavorable attitudes the privileged outgroup has about them as a frame of reference or schema to evaluate themselves. This process may lead to low self-esteem, a shattered social identity, or even feelings of self-hatred. These kinds of intra- and intergroup dynamics have motivated our research program on intra- and intergroup relations.
