I'm not sure it does depend on that. Suppose your ingroup is made up predominantly of people with ginger hair and your outgroup predominantly of people with brown hair. Then if you make fun of people with brown hair, and admire people with ginger hair, you're raising the status of your ingroup relative to your outgroup even if you apply this rule consistently given hair colour.

Similarly, if your ingroup is predominantly made up of people who don't make a certain kind of mistake and your outgroup is mostly made up of people who do.

It's not clear to me that there's a good way to tease apart the two hypotheses here. And of course they could both be right: Nigel may sincerely care about the nerdy stuff but also on some level be concerned about raising the status of his fellow nerds.