Attitudes on Campus: Applying a Theory, Outgroup Homogeny Effect

Even though Tech is a campus comprised of mainly engineers there seems to be a lot of attitudes about one type of engineering versus the other. I think that this is because early on our education we are encouraged to spend time with people in the same major from joining clubs to partnering in class for homework assignments. This seems to form ingroups. And while the ingroups aren’t necessarily particularly click-ish there definitely are some attitudes from one type of engineering to another.
I did a short survey for a Technocrat article on what the attitudes where from various majors on campus. I sent it to as many people as I could and tried to get some feedback from every major at Tech. What I found was that although students think that they work as hard as other students and they feel that their major is as important as others, they aren’t given equal respect. For instance non-engineering students whether two year, four year, or graduate degree earning majors all felt that they were treated as second-class citizens by students in engineering majors. Among engineering majors there were also just as many conflicts with those ingroups. Petroleum Engineers were reported to have insulted the most students, whether by touting the income they would earn one day or reducing fields such as Environmental Engineering to nothing more than a “glorified clean-up crew.” The thing is, I suspect that once out of Tech, if these same separated students were to meet up, their actions would be much different. For example, if two different engineering majors met at a bar one night after being in the workforce several years I think you would find that past ingroup biases would be forgotten and they would feel as though they were both part of either an engineering or Montana Tech ingroup.
Either way, although most engineers have similar interests and intelligence, there still seems to be some need to form ingroups. People tend to think either their group is superior or at least equal to that of others. While they see people in their ingroup as separate indiviuals, they reported seeing other groups as similar. This was proved when I asked them to use several words to describe their own majors versus that of others. They had a hard time generalizing their own ingroups but then used specified, often negative statements to describe others. For example, other majors were “greedy,” “approval-seeking,” or “slackers.” Out group descriptions were short and simple while ingroup descriptions were longer and more varied and emphasized diversity in character.