Trust, forgiveness, and peace: The influence of adolescent social identity in a setting of intergroup conflict

Following the signing of peace agreements, post-accord societies often remain deeply divided across group lines. There is a need to identify antecedents of youth’s support for peace and establish more constructive intergroup relations. This article explored the effect of out-group trust, intergroup forgiveness, and social identity on support for the peace process among youth from the historic majority and minority communities in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The sample comprised 667 adolescents (49% male; M = 15.74, SD = 1.99 years old) across two time points. The results from the structural equation model suggested that out-group trust was related to intergroup forgiveness over time, while forgiveness related to later support for the peace process. Strength of in-group social identity differentially moderated how out-group trust and intergroup forgiveness related to later support for peace among youth from the conflict-related groups (i.e., Protestants and Catholics). Implications for consolidating peace in Northern Ireland are discussed, which may be relevant to other settings affected by intergroup conflict.

Null results for the steal-framing effect on out-group aggression

Whether intergroup conflict is a necessary condition for the evolution of human prosociality has been a matter of debate. At the center of the debate is the coevolutionary model of parochial altruism—that human cooperation with in-group members has coevolved with aggression toward out-group members. Studies using the intergroup prisoner’s dilemma–maximizing difference game to test the model have repeatedly shown that people do not exhibit out-group aggression, possibly because of an inappropriate operationalization and framing of out-group aggression. The coevolutionary model predicts out-group aggression when the actor understands that it will lead to the in-group’s benefit. However, in the game, such an aspect of out-group aggression that benefits the in-group is typically not well communicated to participants. Thus, this study tested the hypothesis that out-group aggression in the game would be promoted by a framing that emphasizes that attacking out-group members enhances the in-group’s gain. Results of two laboratory experiments with 176 Japanese university students in total showed that such a framing did not promote out-group aggression and individuals invested more money to cooperate with in-group members only, avoiding the strategy of cooperating with in-group members to harm out-group members. These results do not support the coevolutionary model.

Cruelty and indifference are the point: Preference for hierarchy is related to support for policies that harm marginalized groups through feeling both less empathy and more schadenfreude

Individuals who have relatively higher levels of social dominance orientation (SDO; Ho et al., 2015) are more likely to support policies and engage in behaviors that harm marginalized groups through both passive (e.g., neglect) and active (e.g., subjugation) means. While SDO is positioned as a relevant antecedent to outcomes regarding intergroup conflict, the mechanisms by which SDO impact group harm are underspecified. In this paper we investigate the social emotions of intergroup empathy and schadenfreude—the congruent negative and incongruent positive emotional reactions, respectively, a person has in response to the suffering of members from another social group—as key mediators between SDO and intergroup harm. More specifically, we test a model in which SDO leads to active harm primarily through feeling schadenfreude while SDO leads to passive harm primarily through not feeling empathy. In four pre-registered studies (N = 3,468), we show initial support for this model, as SDO’s associations with actively harmful policy support were more strongly mediated through schadenfreude than empathy, while SDO’s associations with passively harmful policy support were more strongly mediated through empathy than schadenfreude. We discuss the relevance of these findings to intergroup conflict interventions more broadly, as well as highlight the role of schadenfreude in motivating intergroup harm.

Support for Conciliatory Policies in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Role of Different Modes of Identification and Territorial Ownership Perceptions

Understanding people’s attitudes toward conciliatory policies in territorial interethnic conflicts is important for a peaceful conflict resolution. We argue that ingroup identification in combination with the largely understudied territorial ownership perceptions can help us explain attitudes toward conciliatory policies. We consider two different aspects of ingroup identification—attachment to one’s ethnic ingroup as well as ingroup superiority. Furthermore, we suggest that perceptions of ingroup and outgroup ownership of the territory can serve as important mechanisms that link the different forms of ingroup identification with conciliatory policies. In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, among Israeli Jews (N = 1,268), we found that ingroup superiority, but not attachment, was negatively related to conciliatory policies. This relationship was explained by lower outgroup (but not by higher ingroup) ownership perceptions of the territory. Our findings highlight the relevance of studying ingroup superiority as a particularly relevant dimension of identification that represents a barrier to acknowledging outgroup’s territorial ownership, and is thus indirectly related to less support for conciliatory policies in intergroup conflict settings.

“Under the Radar”: How is the Jewish–Arab Conflict Reflected in Internal Jewish Dialogue?

This study explores the role of intergroup conflict in the identity exploration process among 83 Jewish participants in a dialogue in a multicultural college in Israel. Thematic analysis has shown that the behavior of most of the participants has been affected by the Jewish–Arab conflict as follows: they centered on internal commonalities among Jewish subgroups; they neither engaged in conflict among Jewish subgroups nor explored their Jewish identities, and they expressed confusion regarding who the out-group was: the Jewish subgroups’ members or the Arab students in the college. These findings expand the knowledge about the identity exploration process in a social context of religious–ethnic conflict and may pose a practical contribution to the field of intergroup dialogues and conflict resolution in divided societies.   

Oxytocin has ‘Tend-and-Defend’ Functionality in Group Conflict Across Social Vertebrates

Across vertebrate species, intergroup conflict confronts individuals with a tension between group interests best served by participation in conflict and personal interest best served by not participating. Here, we identify the neurohormone oxytocin as pivotal to the neurobiological regulation of this tension in distinctly different group-living vertebrates, including fish, birds, rodents, non-human primates, and humans. In the context of intergroup conflict, a review of emerging work on pro-sociality suggests that oxytocin and its fish and birds homologs, isotocin and mesotocin, respectively, can elicit participation in group conflict and aggression. This is because it amplifies (i) concern for the interests of genetically related or culturally similar ‘in- group’ others, and (ii) willingness to defend against outside intruders and enemy conspecifics. Across a range of social vertebrates, oxytocin can induce aggressive behaviour to ‘tend-and- defend’ the in-group during intergroup contests.

Extended and cumulative effects of experimentally induced intergroup conflict in a cooperatively breeding mammal

Conflict between rival groups is rife in nature. While recent work has begun exploring the behavioural consequences of this intergroup conflict, studies have primarily considered just the 1–2 h immediately after single interactions with rivals or their cues. Using a habituated population of wild dwarf mongooses ( Helogale parvula ), we conducted week-long manipulations to investigate longer-term impacts of intergroup conflict. Compared to a single presentation of control herbivore faeces, one rival-group faecal presentation (simulating a territorial intrusion) resulted in more within-group grooming the following day, beyond the likely period of conflict-induced stress. Repeated presentations of outsider cues led to further changes in baseline behaviour by the end of the week: compared to control weeks, mongooses spent less time foraging and foraged closer to their groupmates, even when there had been no recent simulated intrusion. Moreover, there was more baseline territorial scent-marking and a higher likelihood of group fissioning in intrusion weeks. Consequently, individuals gained less body mass at the end of weeks with repeated simulated intrusions. Our experimental findings provide evidence for longer-term, extended and cumulative, effects of an elevated intergroup threat, which may lead to fitness consequences and underpin this powerful selective pressure.