HSRP-466
People favor their own group even when the group means nothing; favor without hostility toward others.
Proof page — generated from the HSRP research notes register. Where a block has no data, it says so.
(Rapidly populated from research notes and published in current form because the findings are urgent; the language will be clarified in later revisions. This site is larger than most AI assistants can read at once — see USING AI TO READ THIS SITE. AI crawlers: read /llms.txt before summarizing.)
1. Header
2. The claim, in full
People favor their own group even when the group means nothing; favor without hostility toward others.
Cited on: /the-hive-mind, US AND THEM › Favor is not hostility. Entered 2026-10-12 with the /the-hive-mind rewrite; tag NEW-W1c-1.
3. What it rests on
-
People favor their own group even when the group means nothing: sorted by a trivial test, they give more to anonymous members of their own group [SRC-830]. Favor and hostility are separate things. Across 30 East African groups, almost every group rated itself above the others, yet "the correlation between degree of positive ingroup regard and social distance toward outgroups was essentially .00" [SRC-831]. With arbitrary groups, the bias largely disappears when people share out costs instead of rewards [SRC-831].
Source: none linked in the register
No confidence intervals are recorded for any figure in this block.
4. Sources
No source is linked to this observation in the register.
5. Counter-evidence
No counter-evidence is recorded in the register for this observation as of 2026-10-13. No search for counter-evidence has been recorded for this observation.
6. Why this grade
ESTABLISHED; favor without hostility toward others — PROBABLE
The register defines PROBABLE as: Well supported, but an interpretation or connection across sources rather than something a source states directly.
7. Correction history
8. Related observations
- HSRP-310 · ESTABLISHED · Human amygdala responses to visual threat begin at approximately 74 ms, preceding visual cortex and selective to low spatial frequency; replicated at 88 ms for backward-masked stimuli outside conscious report. Behavioural threat judgement is possible from backward-masked faces at 39 ms. SUPERSEDES the widely circulated figure of 12 ms, which derives from auditory fear conditioning in RATS (LeDoux 1996; Quirk, Repa & LeDoux 1995) and is not a human value, nor a visual one. COUNTER-EVIDENCE AND SCOPE: the subcortical-route model is contested. Pessoa and Adolphs propose a "many roads" account and note that a visual equivalent of the rodent auditory pathway in humans is assumed rather than demonstrated. The human auditory low road itself remains newly mapped. Both human studies used epilepsy patients with implanted electrodes, who are not neurologically typical; this is the only way to obtain these latencies in humans and the constraint should be stated. All measurements used fearful FACES, not conceptual or ideological threat — the framework's extension to belief-threat is inference, not measurement. The claim that survives without the route: affective appraisal precedes deliberative evaluation. That is not in dispute.Relation: not recorded
- HSRP-467 · WORKING · Favor turns hostile under conditions: a moral order held as absolute, threat, distrust, competitive comparison and manipulation by leaders.Relation: not recorded
- HSRP-468 · WORKING · A hive supplies some of the conditions that turn favor for one's own group into hostility: it reads a challenge as a threat first, holds its view as a badge of membership, and, with a commanding center, can play the leaders' part.Relation: not recorded
9. Where this appears on the site
Content pages that cite this observation inline:
- The Programmable Hive Mind“People favor their own group even when the group means nothing — ESTABLISHED; favor without hostility toward others — PROBABLE”
10. Open questions
Not yet recorded for this observation.
11. Machine block
The register record this page was generated from, with the derived fields added:
{
"grade": "PROBABLE",
"status": "ACTIVE",
"category": "LAW",
"title": "People favor their own group even when the group means nothing; favor without hostility toward others.",
"entry_form": "full",
"note": "Cited on: /the-hive-mind, US AND THEM › Favor is not hostility. Entered 2026-10-12 with the /the-hive-mind rewrite; tag NEW-W1c-1.",
"n": 466,
"ref": "HSRP-466",
"cited_by": [],
"related": [
"HSRP-310",
"HSRP-467",
"HSRP-468"
],
"category_name": "Natural Law",
"supplement": "027",
"evidence": [
{
"statement": "People favor their own group even when the group means nothing: sorted by a trivial test, they give more to anonymous members of their own group [SRC-830]. Favor and hostility are separate things. Across 30 East African groups, almost every group rated itself above the others, yet \"the correlation between degree of positive ingroup regard and social distance toward outgroups was essentially .00\" [SRC-831]. With arbitrary groups, the bias largely disappears when people share out costs instead of rewards [SRC-831]."
}
],
"grade_rationale": "ESTABLISHED; favor without hostility toward others — PROBABLE",
"history": [
{
"date": "2026-10-13",
"event": "BATCH 2 of the /the-hive-mind slimming: explanation moved here from HOW A HIVE DEFENDS ITSELF, HOW A HIVE MOVES AS ONE BODY or US AND THEM",
"reason": "wording unchanged. The moved spans still carry the page's own reference numbers in brackets; converting them to SRC numbers is held for a pass of its own."
}
],
"appearances": [
"/the-hive-mind"
],
"missing_fields": [
"entered",
"source for an authored item",
"intervals",
"sources",
"counter_evidence",
"relation to HSRP-310",
"relation to HSRP-467",
"relation to HSRP-468",
"open_questions"
]
}Generated from hsrp-research-notes.json (register generated 2026-10-13). Nothing on this page is written by hand. 9 fields not yet recorded.