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Andy’s Quick Hits (247): Reward Drives Aggressive Behaviour Against “Others”
Us vs. them is known as in-groups vs. out-groups in psychology. This is the well-known effect of people being loyal to their own groups and being competitive and often aggressive to the out-group. This happens in multiple groups. Obvious ones are nationalities, religious groups, sports teams, but also geographical regions.
Previous research has shown that we human beings are very good at creating groups and this can be formed very quickly. We also know that these groups, at extreme levels, can be the cause of much of what we consider evil in society, aggression, abuse, murder, torture, and genocide.
What may also be surprising, to some, is that all evidence points to this being hardwired i.e. babies as young as 3-months-old exhibit favouritism to in-groups and out-groups and this includes punishing the out-group and rewarding the in-group!
Now researchers at the Virginia Commonwealth University have investigated this effect further and come to some surprising, to some, conclusions!
What did they find?
They put 35 male college students through online competitive aggressive tasks. For this they told they would be competing with participants from a rival university. In fact, they competed against a…
