Differentiate between In–groups and Out- groups.
(i) ‘In-group’ are ‘we-group. The contrasting ‘out-group’ are ‘they group’ or ‘others-group’.
(ii) For any individual ‘In-group’ is the group to which he belongs whereas ‘Out- group’ is one to which other than ‘him’ belong.
(iii) In-groups and out groups are of no specific size and may indeed be highly variable.
(iv) The groups with which the individual indentifies himself are his ‘In-groups’ : family, tribe, sex, college,or occupation by virtue of one's awareness of likeness or consciousness of kind. Thus, in-group is a circle of people in which he or she belongs. In - group conveys a feeling of ‘we’, a sense of unity the groups with which the individual identifies himself are his in–groups.
An in–group acquires its consciousness of being from the exclusion of some persons as well as from the inclusion of other persons.
An in–group may be as small as a family or as large as a society itself.
And the out-group, then, is simply everybody who is not in the family or not in the in-group, as the case may be. In contrast (to In-group) an Out-group is a circle of people to Which an
individual feels no sense of belongingness. Out-group conveys a feeling of ‘they’ or ‘those-others’. For example a tiller of the soil in India views his landlord as ‘out-group’.
It-follows (the out-groups) that out-group is defined by the individual with relation to the in-group, usually expressed in the contrast between ‘we’ and ‘they’ or ‘other’.
(v) An in - group is simply the ‘we - group’, an out-group the they-group. The in-group includes ourselves and anybody we happen to mean when we use the pronoun ‘we’.
(vi) The out-group by substraction, includes everybody else or, as we may somewhat paradoxically say, everybody who is excluded when we use the word, ‘we’.
(vii) In group altitudes, as we have seen, generally contain some element of sympathy and always a sense of attachment to the members of the group. Out-group attitudes are always marked by a sense of difference and frequently, though not always,by some degree of antagonism. The latter varies from the mild antipathy of, say fraternity members towards the ‘unorganized’ college students to such powerful aversions as those engendered by the culturally imposed higher caste-lower caste line in theoretically democratic society.
