Exploring the foundations of unilateral loyalty in coalitional psychology: Identifying mechanisms of identity, morality, and disgust.

Abstract

Team sports and sports team fandom illustrate design features of evolved coalitional psychology, including components related to ingroup loyalty and intergroup competition. In psychological research, loyalty is behaviorally defined as staying within a group, even when one may benefit from leaving. Disloyalty is behaviorally defined as switching sides in a competition to obtain better outcomes. Three studies (Ns ϭ 251, 938, 267) examined another form of disloyalty, simultaneously displaying allegiance to both the home team and its rival, as well as beliefs that true group loyalty is unilateral within a set of competitors. The study was framed in the context of a prominent university sports rivalry. Results suggest convergence between cognitive and affective pathways facilitating group loyalty, with both uniquely contributing mechanisms and relationships among these mechanisms. Identification with the home university, concern with moral issues related to group interests, concern with the rights, preferences, and treatment of individuals as autonomous social agents, and disgust sensitivity were associated with anger and disgust reactions to displays of mixed loyalty and beliefs that loyalty is unilateral among competitors. Concerns in binding and individualizing moral domains and team identity fusion were more consistently related to reactions and unilateral loyalty beliefs than were disgust domains. These constructs may facilitate group interests as part of our evolved coalitional psychology. Men consistently scored higher on beliefs in loyalty as unilateral and tended to score higher on constructs related to group interests. Women consistently scored higher on concern for the rights, preferences, and treatment of individuals. Public Significance StatementPsychological phenomena thought to promote group coordination and the interests of one's social group are related to concepts of group loyalty. Identification with the group, moral concerns, and disgust sensitivity to pathogens and sexual stimuli were related to the idea that people can only be loyal to one team in a set of competitors. Moral concerns were related to emotional reactions to individuals displaying dual loyalty to rival teams.

A (failed) attempt to falsify the alliance hypothesis of racial categorization: Racial categorization is not reduced when crossed with a nonalliance category.

“…The candidate system explored in these studies is what has been variously called either coalitional psychology or the alliance detection system , which are classes of systems for (a) attending to patterns of coordination, cooperation out in the world, and (b) picking up on cues that track these patterns—all as way to predict others’ behavior (including who is likely to side with whom in conflicts) and to guide one’s own decision-making (Bissonnette et al, 2015; Boyer, 2020; Boyer et al, 2015; Cikara, 2018, 2020; Cosmides et al, 2003; Harcourt & deWall, 1992; Kruger, 2021; Lopez et al, 2011; Pietraszewski, 2013, 2020, 2021b). The claim is that this system—when exposed to social ecologies in which physical features tend to predict patterns of coordination, cooperation, or conflict—will then register these features and make use of them to make alliance-based inferences, which in turn leads to the perception of “race” (Bonam et al, 2016, 2017; Cosmides et al, 2003; Eason, 2018; Enos & Celaya, 2018; Pietraszewski, 2021a; Roberts et al, 2017).…”

A Darwinian approach to the study of sports, games, and athletics.

“…The empirical articles within this collection include original research in the following areas: coalitional play fighting and outgroup formidability assessment (Sugiyama et al, 2021); coalitional psychology in sports team fandom (Kruger, 2021); facultative formidability and physical aggression in contact sports (Webster et al, 2021); sex differences in intragroup exclusion and aggression in team sports (Deaner et al, 2021); morphological adaptations for fighting among men (Richardson, 2021); handedness and male–male competition in interactive sports (Gallup & Sleicher, 2021); and the effects of video game play on self-perceived mate value and mate preferences (Kasumovic et al, 2021). The issue concludes with a review article that integrates evolutionary literature on physical activity and play with research from sport science and pedagogy (Furley, 2021).…”