What Is Otherness? The Psychology of Us vs. Them

Otherness is the perception that certain people are fundamentally different from “us” and therefore do not fully belong, deserve equal treatment, or share the same emotional depth. It operates at every level of human social life, from the snap judgments your brain makes about unfamiliar faces to the political narratives that frame entire populations as threats. Research across psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology suggests that the tendency to divide the world into in-groups and out-groups is deeply wired, yet the specific boundaries we draw and the consequences that follow are remarkably flexible and culturally shaped.

Why Humans Default to Us-Versus-Them

The speed at which people sort one another into categories is striking. Experiments using what researchers call “minimal groups” have shown that simply assigning people to arbitrary teams is enough to trigger favoritism toward fellow members and coolness toward outsiders. Even when the grouping is based on something as trivial as a coin flip, people begin to attribute more positive traits to their own side.

1Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Evidence for Implicit Evaluative In-Group Bias: Affect-Biased Spontaneous Trait Inference in a Minimal Group Paradigm

One influential explanation for why this happens reaches back into deep evolutionary time. Modeling work simulating conditions similar to those experienced by humans in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene suggests that two traits, cooperativeness within a group and hostility toward rival groups, could not have spread through populations independently. Neither was advantageous on its own. But when the two traits appeared together, the combination gave groups an edge in intergroup competition, allowing both to spread jointly.

2PubMed. The coevolution of parochial altruism and war

This idea, sometimes called parochial altruism, proposes that the willingness to sacrifice for your own group and the readiness to treat outsiders as adversaries evolved as a package deal. A review of the theory notes that it draws on an argument originally sketched by Darwin: that violent conflict between groups could have driven the evolution of within-group cooperativeness and even self-sacrifice.

3PubMed Central. The evolutionary interplay of intergroup conflict and altruism in humans: a review of parochial altruism theory and prospects for its extension

None of this means that hostility toward outsiders is “natural” in a way that excuses it. Evolutionary heritage is not destiny. But it does help explain why the pull toward in-group favoritism is so automatic and why it takes deliberate effort to override.

What Happens in the Brain When You Encounter an Outsider

Neuroscience adds a visceral dimension to the picture. When people watch someone from their own group experiencing sadness, their brain activity mirrors the pattern associated with feeling sad themselves. When they watch an out-group member in the same situation, that mirroring effect weakens or disappears. An EEG study measuring brain oscillations found that participants showed empathy-related neural activation for in-group members’ distress but not for out-group members’ distress. The more prejudiced the participant, the wider this gap became.

4PubMed Central. Intergroup differences in the sharing of emotive states: neural evidence of an empathy gap

This empathy gap matters because empathy is one of the main brakes on cruelty. If your brain does not spontaneously register an outsider’s suffering the same way it registers an insider’s, you are less likely to intervene, less likely to protest unfair treatment, and more likely to tolerate harm. The researchers were careful to note that this is not an unchangeable feature of the brain; it reflects a default that can be overridden with active effort. But left on autopilot, the brain appears to ration empathy along group lines.

How People Strip Humanity from Outsiders

Otherness does not stop at reduced empathy. At its most extreme, it involves perceiving out-group members as less than fully human. Research on dehumanization identifies two distinct forms. One is animalistic: denying outsiders the qualities that supposedly distinguish humans from animals, such as rationality, civility, and self-control. The other is mechanistic: denying outsiders the qualities considered part of human nature, such as warmth, emotionality, and the capacity for deep feeling.

5PubMed. Dehumanization: an integrative review

These two forms have different downstream effects. Experimental work on labor exploitation found that when workers were perceived as machine-like, lacking warmth and emotionality, participants were less opposed to their exploitation. The link was specific: people judged the mechanistically dehumanized workers as more capable of enduring hardship, which made the exploitation seem less objectionable. Animalistic dehumanization, by contrast, did not produce the same pattern when it came to tolerating labor exploitation.

6Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Dissociations between animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization in the context of labor exploitation

A subtler version of this phenomenon is called infrahumanization. People reliably attribute complex emotions like nostalgia, hope, and guilt to their own group more readily than to out-groups, while basic emotions like anger or joy are attributed equally to everyone. The implication is quiet but damaging: “they” can feel pain, sure, but “they” lack the richer emotional life that makes “us” fully human.

7PubMed. Infrahumanization or familiarity? Attribution of uniquely human emotions to the self, the ingroup, and the outgroup

The Language People Use Without Realizing It

Otherness embeds itself in everyday speech in ways most people never notice. Research on what is called the linguistic intergroup bias shows a consistent pattern: when describing a positive action by an in-group member, people tend to use abstract, personality-level language (“she’s generous”). When describing the same kind of action by an out-group member, they reach for concrete, situation-specific language (“she gave the man a dollar”). For negative behaviors, the pattern reverses. An out-group member’s bad behavior gets described abstractly (“he’s aggressive”), while the same behavior from an in-group member gets described concretely (“he shoved him during the argument”).

8PubMed. Language use in intergroup contexts: the linguistic intergroup bias

The practical effect is that good behavior by outsiders sounds like a one-off, while bad behavior sounds like a character trait. For insiders, the opposite framing applies. And listeners pick up on the cues. Research has found that people who read language exhibiting this pattern can infer the group membership of the person being described. In other words, the bias is not just something speakers project; it is something listeners decode, reinforcing group boundaries from both sides of a conversation.

9PubMed. Inferring Identity From Language: Linguistic Intergroup Bias Informs Social Categorization

When Otherness Starts

If you are wondering whether children absorb these patterns or are born with them, the answer is a bit of both. Studies using child-friendly versions of implicit association tasks have detected pro-in-group racial bias in children as young as six. In one study of white American children, implicit pro-white bias was already present at age six and persisted through age ten and into adulthood.

10PubMed. The development of implicit attitudes. Evidence of race evaluations from ages 6 and 10 and adulthood

The developmental picture is more nuanced than a simple “bias grows with age” story, though. Research tracking implicit biases across childhood has found that the youngest children tested showed biases in multiple directions simultaneously, sometimes favoring their own group and sometimes not. The biases then diverged over time, shaped by the social environment the child grew up in.

11PubMed Central. Differential developmental courses of implicit and explicit biases for different other-race classes

What this suggests is that the cognitive machinery for sorting people into categories is in place very early, but the content of those categories, who counts as “other” and what that means, is learned from the surrounding culture. A child growing up in a racially homogeneous environment absorbs different grouping rules than one growing up in a diverse city, even though both children are running the same underlying software.

Stereotypes Are Not One-Dimensional

Common sense might suggest that we view out-groups with straightforward dislike: cold, incompetent, threatening. Reality is messier. The stereotype content model, tested across multiple nations, finds that people evaluate social groups along two dimensions, warmth and competence, and that many out-group stereotypes are mixed rather than uniformly negative. Some groups are stereotyped as warm but incompetent (a combination that elicits pity), while others are seen as competent but cold (a combination that elicits envy). Pure contempt, low on both dimensions, is reserved for the most marginalized.

12PubMed. A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition

Cross-cultural studies involving samples from seven European and three East Asian countries confirmed the same basic structure: warmth and competence emerged as the two organizing dimensions everywhere tested, and ambivalent stereotypes (high on one dimension, low on the other) were common across all of them. High-status groups were stereotyped as competent, and groups seen as competitive were stereotyped as lacking warmth.

13PubMed Central. Stereotype content model across cultures: towards universal similarities and some differences

This matters for understanding otherness because it means that prejudice is not always experienced as overt hostility. Paternalistic stereotypes, the “they’re sweet but helpless” variety, can feel benign to the person holding them while still boxing an out-group into a subordinate role. The emotional texture of otherness shifts depending on where the “other” falls in the warmth-competence space, and so do the policies people support toward them.

When Otherness Pushes People Outside the Moral Circle

At its most consequential, otherness does not just shape how you feel about outsiders; it redraws the boundaries of who counts as deserving fairness at all. The concept of moral exclusion describes the process by which certain individuals or groups come to be seen as outside the scope in which moral rules, fairness considerations, and justice obligations apply.

14Journal of Social Issues. Moral Exclusion and Injustice: An Introduction

When a group is morally excluded, harm done to them can feel acceptable or at least unworthy of attention. The mechanisms discussed earlier, empathy gaps, dehumanization, and linguistic bias, all contribute to this process. Once someone has been implicitly reclassified as outside the moral community, the usual brakes on mistreatment lose their force. Historical atrocities often follow a recognizable pattern in which propaganda first repositions the target group as fundamentally different, then gradually outside the circle of moral concern, before violence becomes politically viable.

How Media Amplifies Otherness

Media consumption plays a measurable role in shaping how strongly people perceive out-groups as threats. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, survey research found that the amount of media people consumed predicted how strongly they perceived Chinese people as a health threat and how much they blamed Chinese people for the outbreak. Those heightened threat perceptions, in turn, predicted support for derogatory media content and stronger intentions to act aggressively toward Chinese individuals.

15PubMed Central. How are we going to treat Chinese people during the pandemic? Media cultivation of intergroup threat and blame

The effect is not limited to crisis periods. Experimental work on media portrayals of immigrants found that exposure to negative portrayals increased perceived out-group threat and triggered a measurable physiological stress response. Participants who watched negative coverage showed a shift in their testosterone-to-cortisol ratio, a hormonal pattern associated with a competitive, defensive state, that was about 39 percentage points higher than in participants who watched no video at all.

16Scientific Reports. Negative media portrayals of immigrants increase ingroup favoritism and hostile physiological and emotional reactions

Positive portrayals, by contrast, did not produce a statistically significant reduction in threat perception in the same study. The asymmetry is worth sitting with: negative media about out-groups reliably moves the needle toward hostility, but positive media does not seem to counteract it with equal force. This suggests that simply “balancing” coverage may not be enough to undo the damage of threat-framing.

Intersecting Identities and Layered Otherness

Otherness rarely operates along a single axis. A person is not just a member of one out-group; they may be simultaneously categorized by race, gender, class, religion, disability status, and more. Research on intersectionality in social psychology emphasizes that the experience of being othered at the intersection of multiple identities cannot be understood by simply adding up the effects of each category. The combination produces emergent patterns of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination that are qualitatively different from what any single category would predict.

17Social and Personality Psychology Compass. Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination at the intersection of race and gender: An intersectional theory primer

A Black woman, for example, does not simply face “racism plus sexism.” She may be subject to stereotypes and forms of exclusion that neither Black men nor white women encounter. Some of these compound stereotypes may be less hostile than either single-axis stereotype alone, while others are more so. The point is that otherness is not additive; it interacts, and those interactions shape real outcomes in hiring, healthcare, policing, and everyday social encounters.

What Chronic Otherness Does to People

Being persistently treated as an outsider takes a psychological toll that goes well beyond hurt feelings. Ostracism, the social experience most closely tied to being othered, threatens what researchers identify as fundamental needs: belonging, control, meaningful existence, and self-esteem. Isolated incidents of being excluded are painful, but the real damage comes from chronic experiences. Repeated ostracism depletes psychological resources over time, leading to feelings of helplessness, alienation, and worthlessness, and longitudinal research has linked chronic ostracism to lasting depressive symptoms.

18Journal of Affective Disorders Reports. Ostracism breeds depression: Longitudinal associations between ostracism and depression over a three-year-period

This is an underappreciated dimension of the otherness discussion. The conversation often focuses on the attitudes and biases of the people doing the othering, but the harm lands on actual bodies and minds. Depression, anxiety, cardiovascular stress, shortened life expectancy: the health consequences of chronic social exclusion are well-documented across marginalized populations. The mechanisms are partly physiological (sustained stress-hormone activation) and partly behavioral (withdrawal from healthcare, reduced social support networks).

What Actually Reduces Otherness

If the tendency to other is deep-rooted, is there anything that reliably weakens it? The most studied answer is intergroup contact. A large meta-analysis found that face-to-face interaction between groups reduces prejudice, and importantly, this effect holds even when the conditions are not ideal. The researcher Gordon Allport originally proposed that contact needed to meet certain conditions, such as equal status, shared goals, and institutional support, to work. The meta-analytic data confirmed that those conditions help: studies that met most of Allport’s criteria showed a larger prejudice-reduction effect. But even when the conditions were not met, contact still reduced prejudice on average.

19International Journal of Intercultural Relations. Recent advances in intergroup contact theory

A related approach involves shifting how people mentally categorize one another. The common in-group identity model proposes that if members of two groups can come to see themselves as part of a single, more inclusive group, the positive feelings normally reserved for fellow in-group members extend to former outsiders. The cognitive trick is not to eliminate group identities but to draw a larger circle around them.

20International Journal of Intercultural Relations. Revisiting the contact hypothesis: The induction of a common ingroup identity

More recent experimental work has explored whether virtual reality can achieve something similar. In one study, light-skinned participants who spent time embodied in a dark-skinned virtual avatar showed a measurable reduction in implicit racial bias compared to participants embodied in a light-skinned avatar or a purple-skinned avatar.

21Consciousness and Cognition. Putting yourself in the skin of a black avatar reduces implicit racial bias

A separate VR study that also involved racial embodiment found lower implicit racial bias among participants who had experienced the embodied condition, reinforcing the finding that perspective-taking through virtual experience can nudge automatic attitudes.

22PubMed Central. The impact of virtual reality on implicit racial bias and mock legal decisions

These results are promising but come with caveats. Most VR studies are short-term lab experiments; whether the bias reductions persist over weeks or months in the real world is an open question. And contact-based interventions, while reliable in the aggregate, can backfire if the contact is competitive, unequal, or forced. The evidence is clear that otherness can be reduced, but the scale and durability of existing interventions do not yet match the scale of the problem.

Otherness Beyond Humans

One of the more provocative findings in recent years is that lethal intergroup aggression is not unique to humans. Bonobos, long considered the peaceful cousins of chimpanzees, were recently documented engaging in a violent intergroup incident at the Kokolopori research site in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A coalition from one community attacked a female from a neighboring community during what had begun as a peaceful foraging encounter. The female’s infant was subsequently taken by members of the attacking group and died the following day.

23PubMed Central. A lethal incident during an intergroup encounter in bonobos

The researchers noted that while bonobo communities often display tolerance and cooperation during encounters with neighbors, aggression during such encounters is also common. The lethal outcome in this case underscores that intergroup dynamics in bonobos are more complex and unpredictable than their reputation suggests. This does not mean bonobos have “otherness” in the psychological sense that humans do, but it does suggest that the behavioral raw material, cooperation within groups paired with occasional hostility toward outsiders, has deep roots in the primate lineage. The human elaboration of this tendency into ideology, language, media narratives, and institutional exclusion is our own contribution.