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Description: Even though there was no explicit mention of groups or any group assignment in our individual task setup, in principle, one could imagine that, even without any instruction to do so, some participants may still project an ingroup or outgroup identity onto the single other individual when they demonstrated the same versus a different outcome. We make several comments about this possibility. First, such implicit group assignment to individuals would oppose social identity theory’s assumptions that a group manipulation is logically required to link discriminatory tendencies to intergroup processes1. Second, while this theoretical possibility cannot be excluded from our experimental design, the experimental set-up that we used does not make it likely. In Exp. 4-6, where no groups were mentioned, none out of 225 participants made any reference to groups when explaining the strategy that they used to allocate points – instead they referred mostly to disagreement or the difference in coin flip. Moreover, studies that have focussed on similarity versus difference in meaningful opinions/values/attitudes to explain discrimination8,18,21,22 have also been presented as an alternative to, rather than an extension of, the social identity literature. The a priori assumption in the discrimination domain, including by Tajfel and colleagues1, is thus that an individual difference with a single other individual cannot be taken as evidence for intergroup processes. Likewise, social congruency designs similar to those described in this manuscript have also been implemented for decades in the field of cognitive neuroscience without results being attributed to group-based or identity processes 24,27,42–46. All in all, the assumption that groups are projected to the individual remains speculative at best, given the experimental design and the assumptions of social identity theory. If intergroup processes associated with social identity theory should be expected to apply during interactions with one individual in contexts devoid of a group manipulation, then this assumption needs to be made explicit in the theory and supported by empirical evidence.