In-group love and out-group derogation – are they necessarily related? Data from the Hadza hunter-gatherers

We hypothesize that in-group love and out-group derogation could be independent of each other when groups do not see each other as competing for limited resources and conditions of the zero-sum game do not apply. In the current study, we confront this hypothesis by investigating the Hadza hunter-gatherers.

To this end, we invited ninety-one (forty-one females) Hadza to play Dictator Game and to choose the wisest and the strongest figurine from two sets of three pictures presenting silhouettes of males and females with distinctive attributes of a typical Hadza, Datoga or Maasai. Results suggest that in-group love is unrelated to out-group derogation in Hadza. With this finding we sketch boundaries to the paradigm of interdependence between in-group love and out-group derogation, previously proven in Western populations characterized by social inequality and imbalanced social exchange.