The Effects Of Physical Violence Threat On Ingroup Derogation Attitudes: Evidences From Behavioral Experiments

Ingroup derogation is a kind of widespread strange phenomenon that people prefer "outgroup members" rather than "ingroup members". Not only in the aspect of recency this phenomenon couldn’t be explained,even from the evolutionary level it’s more difficult to understand. From the viewpoint of evolution, the research derived a hypothesis that ingroup derogation is an evolved response of the threat management mechanism to adapt to the specific conditions that ingroup brings a greater threat of violence to people compared to outgroup. According to the hypothesis,ingroup derogation is an adaptive psychological mechanism which follows the smoke detector principle and the functional flexibility principle. Otherwise, it should be positively correlated with the perceived vulnerability to violence. What’s more, ingroup derogation may due to the reason that people perceived more vulnerability to violence from ingroup than outgroup. It may also show a consistent effect of ingroup derogation on recognition.This hypothesis was tested across four experiments. In Experiment 1,participants’ group membership was manipulated by using a minimal group paradigm. The results indicated that mere social categorization alone was sufficient to elicit ingroup derogation among participants, and,such an ingroup derogation was positively associated with the perceivedvulnerability to violence. As a supplement and extension of experiment 1,Experiment 2 discusses the relationship between the proportion of in-group members, recognition and ingroup derogation,and the results showed that ingroup degeneration effect is not affected by the influence of the proportion of ingroup members. It also showed a consistent effect of in group derogation on recognition. Complied to Experiment 1,Experiment 3 using a minimal group paradigm to discuss participants’ evaluation of neutral faces of ingroup and outgroup from four kinds of emotions which including “happiness” “sadness” “anger” “fear”.The results found that the participants were more easily to regard the ingroup neutral emotional face as anger face, and the subjects perceived ingroup as higher threat of violence. Experiment 4 by manipulating the situation to change the threat level of environment, on the basis of experiment 1,Experiment 4 designed that dark and bright environment conditions to research that when environment changes how the ingroup derogation effect changes. The results indicated that in the dark environment,participants showed an enhancement of ingroup derogation effect.Taken together, through a series of behavioral experiments, the results of this study revealed the previously unexplored effects of the threat of violence on ingroup derogation attitudes. These results showed that there was a linkage between the threat management mechanism which evolved to response to violence and the ingroup derogation, whichsuggested the ingroup derogation effect is a specific response of threat management mechanism towards specific threats of violence. It also provided supports for the hypothesis that ingroup derogation is a evolved psychological adaptability mechanism which evolved to adapt to the conditions that ingroup bring a greater threat of violence compared to outgroup.