Culture has an enormous and powerful effect on your perceptions. When you grow up with certain cultural or co-cultural beliefs, attitudes, and values, you naturally perceive those who share these with you as ingroupers—people you consider as similar to yourself (Allport, 1954). Individuals from many different social groups can be ingroupers if they share important cultural commonalities with you, such as nationality, religious beliefs, ethnicity, age, socioeconomic class, or political views (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987). In contrast, you may view people who aren’t culturally similar to yourself as outgroupers.

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People often feel passionately connected to their ingroups, especially when they reflect central aspects of their self-concept, such as sexual orientation, gender identity, religious beliefs, or ethnic heritage. This feeling of connection means you’re more likely to give your money, time, and help to ingroupers than to outgroupers (Castelli, Tomelleri, & Zogmaister, 2008). For example, if two volunteers show up at your door asking you to donate money and time to a fund-raising effort, which one are you more likely to support: the volunteer working for a group you feel connected to, or the volunteer representing a group you feel no link to? Many people would pick the ingrouper.

You’re also more likely to form positive impressions of people you perceive as ingroupers (Giannakakis & Fritsche, 2011). For instance, in one study of 30 ethnic groups in East Africa, members of each group perceived ingroupers’ communication as more trustworthy, friendly, and honest than outgroupers’ communication (Brewer & Campbell, 1976). When people communicate in rude or inappropriate ways, you’re more inclined to form negative impressions of them if you see them as outgroupers (Brewer, 1999). If a customer at your job snaps at you but is wearing a T-shirt that advocates your cultural beliefs and values, you’re likely to make the attribution, “He’s just having a bad day.” The same communication coming from someone wearing a shirt attacking your cultural beliefs will likely provoke a negative, internal attribution: “What a jerk!”

One of the strongest determinants of ingroup and outgroup perceptions is race. Race classifies people based on common ancestry or descent and is judged almost exclusively by a person’s physical features (Lustig & Koester, 2006). Perceiving someone’s race almost always means assigning him or her to ingrouper or outgrouper status (Brewer, 1999) and communicating with that person based on that status.

When categorizing other people as ingroupers or outgroupers, it’s easy to make mistakes. Even if a person seems to be the same race as you (e.g., white), she may have a very different ethnic, religious, and cultural heritage (you’re Irish Catholic; she’s Russian Jewish). Likewise, even if someone dresses differently than you do, he might hold cultural beliefs, attitudes, and values that are very similar to your own. If you assume that people are ingroupers or outgroupers based on surface-level differences, you may mistakenly perceive that you don’t share anything in common. As a consequence, you might never discover that you do share important qualities and thus could miss out on an opportunity to make a new friend, work productively with a colleague, or form a romantic bond.