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.
Forestier et al. (2026) studied this question.