Dataset Information

Oxytocin promotes coordinated out-group attack during intergroup conflict in humans.

ABSTRACT: Intergroup conflict contributes to human discrimination and violence, but persists because individuals make costly contributions to their group's fighting capacity. Yet, how group members effectively coordinate their contributions during intergroup conflict remains poorly understood. Here, we examine the role of oxytocin for (the coordination of) contributions to group attack or defense in multi-round, real-time feedback intergroup contests. In a double-blind placebo-controlled study with N = 480 males in Intergroup Attacker-Defender Contests, we found that oxytocin reduced contributions to attack and over time increased attacker's within-group coordination of contributions. However, rather than becoming peaceful, attackers given oxytocin better tracked their rival's historical defense and coordinated their contributions into well-timed and hence more profitable attacks. Our results reveal coordination of contributions as a critical component of successful attacks and subscribe to the possibility that oxytocin enables individuals to contribute to in-group efficiency and prosperity even when doing so implies outsiders are excluded or harmed.

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This article has been through an editorial process in which the authors decide how to respond to the issues raised during peer review. The Reviewing Editor's assessment is that all the issues have been addressed (see decision letter).

SUBMITTER: Zhang H

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6347450 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Oxytocin promotes coordinated out-group attack during intergroup conflict in humans.

Zhang Hejing H Gross Jörg J De Dreu Carsten C Ma Yina Y

eLife 20190125

Intergroup conflict contributes to human discrimination and violence, but persists because individuals make costly contributions to their group's fighting capacity. Yet, how group members effectively coordinate their contributions during intergroup conflict remains poorly understood. Here, we examine the role of oxytocin for (the coordination of) contributions to group attack or defense in multi-round, real-time feedback intergroup contests. In a double-blind placebo-controlled study with <i>N</ ...[more]

PMID: 30681410

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Project description:Our research brings to light features of the social world that impact moral judgments and how they do so. The moral vignette data presented were collected in rural and urban Croatian communities that were involved to varying degrees in the Croatian Homeland War. We argue that rapid shifts in moral accommodations during periods of violent social strife can be explained by considering the role that coordination and social agents' ability to reconfigure their social network (i.e., relational mobility) play in moral reasoning. Social agents coordinate on (moral) norms, a general attitude which broadly facilitates cooperation, and makes possible the collective enforcement of compliance. During social strife interested parties recalibrate their determination of others' moral standing and recast their established moral circle, in accordance with their new or prevailing social investments. To that extent, social coordination-and its particular promoters, inhibitors, and determinants-effects significant changes in individuals' ranking of moral priorities. Results indicate that rural participants evaluate the harmful actions of third parties more harshly than urban participants. Coordination mediates that relationship between social environment and moral judgment. Coordination also matters more for the moral evaluation of the harmful actions of moral scenarios involving characters belonging to different social units than for scenarios involving characters belonging to the same group. Participants high in relational mobility-that ability to recompose one's social network-moralize similarly wrongdoings perpetrated by both in- and out-group members. Those low in relational mobility differentiate when an out-group member causes the harm. Additionally, perceptions of third-party guilt are also affected by specifics of the social environment. Overall, we find that social coordination and relational mobility affect moral reasoning more so than ethnic commitment.

Dataset Information

Oxytocin promotes coordinated out-group attack during intergroup conflict in humans.

Editorial note

Publications

Oxytocin promotes coordinated out-group attack during intergroup conflict in humans.

Similar Datasets

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