We studied the effect of intergroup competition on behavior in the minimal-effort game (Van Huyck et al. 1990. Amer. Econ. Rev. 80, 234–248). The group with the higher minimum won the competition and its members were paid according to the game’s payoff matrix. The members of the losing group were paid nothing. We found that intergroup competition improved collective efficiency as compared with ...

Scholars have long explored the colorblind and multicultural ideological approaches to improving intergroup attitudes and relations. Polyculturalism, a newly studied ideological approach, focuses on the past and current interactions and connections among different racial and ethnic groups. Drawing on cross-disciplinary work, we critically examine the various forms that each of these ideological...

Intergroup threat harms attitudes toward the outgroup, leading to greater levels of prejudice and outgroup derogation (Rothgerber, 1997). Two experiments were conducted to examine (1) if perspective taking mitigates the negative influence of threat on explicit and implicit intergenerational attitudes and, if so, (2) whether this buffering effect would be stronger for participants who embodied a...

Studying the most extreme outcomes of intergroup hatred--murder, mass killings and genocides--has long been part of historical and social research. Neuroscientists and psychologists have also been interested in interpersonal and intergroup violence. This article considers the question of how atrocities arise from a neuroscientific perspective, focusing on war as the context in which they most o...

When objective group membership and subjective ethnic identification don’t align, which has a greater impact on how people feel towards the groups they affiliate with, and why? Deprived of many distinctiveness markers typically found in intergroup relations (e.g., physical features, obvious status differences), Taiwanese society provides a perfect natural context to explore the impact of object...

Evolutionary scientists argue that human cooperation is the product of a long history of competition among rival groups. There are various reasons to believe that this logic applies particularly to men. In three experiments, using a step-level public-goods task, we found that men contributed more to their group if their group was competing with other groups than if there was no intergroup compe...

The authors hypothesized that experienced and imagined intergenerational contact should improve older people's math test performance under stereotype threat. In Experiment 1 (N=51, mean age=69 years), positive prior contact with grandchildren eliminated stereotype threat, which was mediated partially by reduced test-related anxiety. In Experiment 2 (N=84, mean age=72 years), the effect of threa...

If intergroup emotions are functional, successfully implementing an emotion-linked behavioral tendency should discharge the emotion, whereas impeding the behavioral tendency should intensify the emotion. We investigated the emotional consequences of satisfying or thwarting emotionally induced intergroup behavioral intentions. Study 1 showed that if an attack on the ingroup produced anger, retal...

Three experiments examined the role of intragroup social influence in intergroup competition. In the context of a mutual fate control situation, participants in Experiment 1 demonstrated more intergroup competition in the presence than in the absence of social support for shared self-interest. Experiment 2 revealed that, in the context of a Prisoner's Dilemma Game, this social support effect wa...