The New Right: Conservative student political repertoires and intragroup conflict

This qualitative single-site case study explores how students identifying as conservative position themselves within the discursive field of their campus, how they understand their rhetorical and discursive development in relation to their more liberal peers, and what increasing political polarization means for college campuses. I find that the differences within the conservative student group studied are stronger and more concerning than how they describe differing from their liberal peers, particularly as the conservative student group I analyzed radicalized and became overtly racist and nationalistic. This is worrisome, as my participants noted this was not “a local problem” and mentioned that this was happening at a state and national level. This reality was evidenced by the recent insurrection at the Capitol.

Examining the Relationship between Work Autonomy and Intragroup Conflict: A Case Study of the Financial Services Industry in Taiwan

The services sector—an essential pillar of Taiwan’s economy—accounts for 59.2% of the country’s employment and 63.2% of the national GDP. With individualism gaining momentum, many people employed in the booming services sector are seeking autonomy in their workplaces, where increased interaction time among colleagues underlines the importance of collaboration. Conflicts are inevitable in these interactions, particularly in today’s diversified society that embraces different ideas and values. Building on prior studies of intragroup conflict, we construct a model that depicts the relationship between financial services workers’ work autonomy and intragroup conflict. A questionnaire survey of workers in Taiwan’s financial institutions is conducted and 266 valid samples are collected. The empirical results obtained through structural equation modeling tests and analysis indicate that work autonomy negatively affects intragroup conflict.

The Scapegoat Mechanism in Human Evolution: An Analysis of René Girard’s Hypothesis on the Process of Hominization

According to anthropological philosopher René Girard (1923–2015), an important human adaptation is our propensity to victimize or scapegoat. He argued that other traits upon which human sociality depends would have destabilized primate dominance-based social hierarchies, making conspecific conflict a limiting factor in hominin evolution. He surmised that a novel mechanism for inhibiting intragroup conflict must have emerged contemporaneously with our social traits, and speculated that this was the tendency to spontaneously unite around the victimization of single individuals. He described an unconscious tendency to both ascribe blame and to imbue the accused with a sacred mystique. This emotionally cathartic scapegoat mechanism, he claimed, enhanced social cohesion, and was the origin of religion, mythology, sacrifice, ritual, cultural institutions, and social norms. It would have functioned by modifying the beliefs and behaviors of the group, rather than of the accused, making the act of accusation more important than the substance. This article aims to examine the empirical evidence for Girard’s claims, and argues that the scapegoat hypothesis has commonalities with several other evolutionary hypotheses, including Wrangham’s execution hypothesis on self-domestication, Dunbar’s hypothesis on the role of storytelling in maintaining group stability, and DeScioli and Kurzban’s hypothesis on the role of non-consequentialist morality in curtailing conflict. Potential implications of the scapegoat hypothesis for evolutionary psychology and psychiatry are discussed.

Does Intragroup Conflict Intensity Matter? The Moderating Effects of Conflict Management on Emotional Exhaustion and Work Engagement

To elucidate the distinct effects of relationship conflict (RC) and task conflict (TC), we investigated the intensity (low vs. high) of the two types of conflict on emotional exhaustion and work engagement. Furthermore, we examined how cooperative vs. competitive conflict-handling styles moderate the relationship between the two types of conflict and emotional exhaustion and work engagement. We also examined the role of emotion regulation (cognitive reappraisal and distraction) as a covariate to control its effects on the study variables. Utilizing two separate 2 × 2 between-subject experimental designs, we recruited 120 employees from several companies in Austria. The results suggest that higher levels of both RC and TC are positively related to emotional exhaustion and negatively to work engagement. A cooperative conflict management style moderated the effects of both RC and TC on work engagement. The results suggest decoupling RC and TC and examining the interplay between the intensity of intragroup conflict types and conflict management styles provides insights into the connection between the levels of conflict, conflict management, emotional exhaustion, and work engagement. Additionally, it supports the usage of distraction as a viable regulation strategy for managing the effects of high levels of RC on emotional exhaustion.

Cooperative Criticism: When Criticism Enhances Creativity in Brainstorming and Negotiation

Long-standing wisdom holds that criticism is antithetical to effective brainstorming because it incites intragroup conflict. However, a number of recent studies have challenged this assumption, suggesting that criticism might actually enhance creativity in brainstorming by fostering divergent thinking. Our paper reconciles these perspectives with new theory and a multimethod investigation to explain when and why criticism promotes creativity in brainstorming. We propose that a cooperative social context allows criticism to be construed positively, spurring creativity without inciting intragroup conflict, whereas a competitive social context makes criticism more divisive, leading to intragroup conflict and a corresponding reduction in creativity. We found support for this theory from a field experiment involving 100 group brainstorming sessions with actual stakeholders in a controversial urban planning project. In a cooperative context, instructions encouraging criticism yielded more ideas and more creative ideas, whereas in a competitive context, encouraging criticism yielded fewer ideas and less creative ideas. We replicated this finding in a laboratory study involving brainstorming in the context of a union-management negotiation scenario, which allowed us to hold constant the nature of the criticism. Taken together, our findings suggest that the optimal context for creativity in brainstorming is a cooperative one in which criticism occurs but is interpreted constructively because the brainstorming parties perceive their goals as aligned.

Bulls in a China Shop: Narcissism, Intragroup Conflict, and Task Cohesion

When given opportunities for personal glory in individual settings, people high in narcissism excel. However, less is known about narcissists’ influence in team contexts. Across two studies (utilizing cross-sectional and two-wave longitudinal designs) involving 706 athletes from 68 teams in total, we tested a conceptual model linking narcissism to task cohesion, via intragroup conflict, moderated by narcissistic group composition. We tested a new sports-oriented measure of intragroup conflict using Bayesian estimation and evaluated our theorizing using a multilevel conditional indirect effect hybrid model. Across both studies, we found that narcissism influenced perceptions of task cohesion via process conflict only, with a negative influence at low narcissistic group composition that was weakened (Study 1) or nullified (Study 2) at high narcissistic team composition. Collectively, these findings offer the first example of how narcissism influences task cohesion in team settings and the contextual effects of narcissistic group composition.