What makes people go to war? Defensive intentions motivate retaliatory and preemptive intergroup aggression

Böhm, Robert; Rusch, Hannes; Gürerk, Özgür

doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.06.005

Cited by 95 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…All group members participated so no subset incurred most of the costs, and chances for any sort of in-kind repayment are clearly limited. However, it is worth noting that their behavior is consistent with recent experimental work in humans indicating that perceived threat to the in-group causes not only retaliatory, but also preemptive aggression54.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Observations of severe and lethal coalitionary attacks in wild mountain gorillas

Rosenbaum

Vecellio²,

Stoinski

2016

Sci Rep

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In humans and chimpanzees, most intraspecific killing occurs during coalitionary intergroup conflict. In the closely related genus Gorilla, such behavior has not been described. We report three cases of multi-male, multi-female wild mountain gorilla (G. beringei) groups attacking extra-group males. The behavior was strikingly similar to reports in chimpanzees, but was never observed in gorillas until after a demographic transition left ~25% of the population living in large social groups with multiple (3+) males. Resource competition is generally considered a motivator of great apes’ (including humans) violent intergroup conflict, but mountain gorillas are non-territorial herbivores with low feeding competition. While adult male gorillas have a defensible resource (i.e. females) and nursing/pregnant females are likely motivated to drive off potentially infanticidal intruders, the participation of others (e.g. juveniles, sub-adults, cycling females) is harder to explain. We speculate that the potential for severe group disruption when current alpha males are severely injured or killed may provide sufficient motivation when the costs to participants are low. These observations suggest that the gorilla population’s recent increase in multi-male groups facilitated the emergence of such behavior, and indicates social structure is a key predictor of coalitionary aggression even in the absence of meaningful resource stress.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Observations of severe and lethal coalitionary attacks in wild mountain gorillas

Rosenbaum

Vecellio²,

Stoinski

2016

Sci Rep

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“…Weak parochial cooperation is intertwined either with universal cooperation or with strong parochial cooperation in the IPD-MD and the NSD, respectively. 7 Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate the relevance of universal, weak parochial, and strong parochial cooperation as well as egoism and suggest how these preferences can potentially determine the course of between-group relations: from competition (strong parochial cooperation; Böhm et al, 2016) to coalition (universal cooperation; Buchan et al, 2009). Experiment 3 shows that these different preferences may follow from interindividual differences: A preference for hierarchies can fuel hostilities between groups by instigating strong parochial cooperation, while EC limits cooperation to the ingroup.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parochial Versus Universal Cooperation: Introducing a Novel Economic Game of Within- and Between-Group Interaction

Aaldering

Böhm

2019

Social Psychological and Personality Science

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Engaging in personally costly within-group cooperation benefits one’s in-group members but also impacts other groups by benefiting, neglecting, or harming out-group members, leading to a range of potential consequences for between-group relations (e.g., collaboration vs. competition). We introduce the Intergroup Parochial and Universal Cooperation (IPUC) game to investigate the prevalence of the individual preferences underlying these different expressions of within-group cooperation: universalism, weak parochialism, and strong parochialism. In two online experiments with natural groups, we show that the IPUC has value beyond existing economic games in measuring these preferences separately. In a third experiment conducted in the lab, we show how dispositional measures traditionally associated with within- and between-group cooperation, that is, social value orientation, social dominance orientation, honesty-humility, and empathic concern, predict different preferences. Thus, the IPUC provides a tool to better understand within- and between-group interactions and to test interventions to overcome intergroup conflict.

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“…This is because, assuming this alternative explanation is right, one would expect that beliefs about the expressed out-party hostility of the out-party members would, to some extent at least, also affect subjects' own choice to express out-party hostility. For example, it is reasonable to expect that they would be positively correlated-reflecting a desire for "pre-emptive strike" (Böhm et al, 2016;Simunovic et al, 2013); in other words, if I think the out-party will aggress against me, I am more inclined to aggress against them. That we did not observe such an association provides some evidence that subjects were not tailoring their own out-party hostility behaviour to what they believed the other players in the IPD-MD would do.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral polarization and out-party hostility in the US political context

Tappin

McKay

2019

J. Soc. Polit. Psych.

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Affective polarization describes the phenomenon whereby people identifying as Republican or Democrat tend to view opposing partisans negatively and co-partisans positively. Though extensively studied, there remain important gaps in scholarly understanding of affective polarization. In particular, (a) how it relates to the distinct behavioural phenomena of in-party “love” vs. out-party hostility; and (b) to what extent it reflects a generalized evaluative disparity between partisans vs. a domain-specific disparity in evaluation. We report the results of an investigation that bears on both of these questions. Specifically, drawing on recent trends in political science and psychology, we hypothesize that moral polarization—the tendency to view opposing partisans’ moral character negatively, and co-partisans’ moral character positively—will be associated with behavioural hostility towards the out-party. We test this hypothesis in two preregistered studies comprising behavioural measures and large convenience samples of US partisans (combined N = 1354). Our results strike an optimistic chord: Taken together, they suggest that this association is probably small and somewhat tenuous. Though moral polarization itself was large—perhaps exceeding prior estimates of trait affective polarization—even the most morally polarized partisans appeared reluctant to engage in a mild form of out-party hostility. These findings converge with recent evidence that polarization—moral or otherwise—has yet to translate into the average US partisan wanting to express hostile and directly discriminatory behaviour toward their out-party counterparts.

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What makes people go to war? Defensive intentions motivate retaliatory and preemptive intergroup aggression

Cited by 95 publications

References 39 publications

Observations of severe and lethal coalitionary attacks in wild mountain gorillas

Observations of severe and lethal coalitionary attacks in wild mountain gorillas

Parochial Versus Universal Cooperation: Introducing a Novel Economic Game of Within- and Between-Group Interaction

Moral polarization and out-party hostility in the US political context

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