Ingroup Relevance Appraisals: Structure and Correlates of Perceiving Threats and Opportunities From Ingroups

People are vigilant to how the groups around them facilitate or inhibit their goals, but we know little about how they appraise the relevance of a particularly important type of group: their ingroups. We test whether the Relevance Appraisal Matrix—a model of person perception structured around goal-contingent threat and opportunity appraisals—captures the structure of people's ingroup perceptions. We find it does (Study 1, n = 463; Study 2, n = 285), meaning that appraisals of the threats and opportunities people's ingroups pose to their goal pursuit are orthogona and goal-specific. We also characterize ingroup relevance appraisals and explore the relationships between them and people's ingroup attitudes and identification (Study 2), finding that people generally rate their ingroups as relatively high-opportunity and low-threat across goals and that relevance appraisals of ingroups are variably and modestly associated with attitudes towards, and identification with, people's ingroups.