Definition
Groups and categories are the elements of social organization in human societies of any size. Whereas the term ‘group’ primarily refers to sets of identifiable individuals, the term ‘category’ primarily refers the mental representation to the building blocks of the social world. Social organization and its mental representation have co-evolved to striking degrees of complexity; yet, simple – even crude – behavioral patterns such as ingroup-favoritism or parochial morality persist.
Humans are social animals, both in their dependency on interaction with individual conspecifics and in their embeddedness in a social structure comprising groups. The nature of these groups varies greatly with ecological, economical, and historical conditions, making it difficult to uncover the essential characteristics of a group-shaped psychology. Studies of the fossil record and surviving hunter-gatherer societies suggest that...
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Krueger, J.I. (2018). Groups and Categories. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2445-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2445-1
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