In-group relevance facilitates learning across existing and new associations

Studies have shown that attention prioritizes stimuli associated with the in-group. However, the extent to which this so-called in-group favoritism is driven by relevance is not clear. Here, we investigated this issue in a group of university rowers using a novel perceptual matching task based on the team label-color associations. Across three experiments, participants showed enhanced performance for the in-group stimulus regardless of its familiarity level. These findings confirmed the role of relevance in in-group favoritism. In a further control study, the advantage for certain stimuli was not found in an independent sample of participants who were not identified with the teams but were familiar with the label-color associations, indicating that in-group relevance was necessary for the in-group favoritism. Together, these findings suggest that in-group relevance facilitates learning across existing and new associations. The consequences of these findings for understanding in-group effects on perceptual processing are discussed.