A Price Paid for Our Internal Strife: Escalated Intragroup Aggression and the Evolution of Ingroup Derogation.

ABSTRACT: From evolutionary reasoning, we derived a novel hypothesis that ingroup derogation is an adaptation to a special ecological condition in which the greater threat of aggression is incurred by ingroup members. This hypothesis was tested and supported across five studies. Specifically, the computational modeling found that ingroup derogation could easily evolve if the chance of death incurred by intragroup conflicts was no less than 10%. Further behavioral experiments on Chinese participants showed that the ingroup derogation mechanism responded to heuristic social category cues and it responded more strongly when participants subjectively felt more vulnerable to interpersonal aggression, or when there were contextual cues of aggression in the immediate environment. Additional results showed

SUBMITTER: Wu Q 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5031712 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature