Investigating the Role of Emotions in Intergroup Conflict

Hudson, Sa-Kiera T, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Jennifer A. Richeson at Yale University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the role of an understudied emotion – schadenfreude or feeling pleasure at another group’s misfortune – in intergroup conflict. In particular, we are studying the importance of schadenfreude in motivating people to not only endorse policies that harm outgroups, but to actually engage in behaviors that will directly harm those groups. Research on intergroup conflict has primarily focused on the importance of empathy in creating prosocial conditions between groups. However, empathy is a weak antecedent of intergroup violence and aggression, suggesting that a lack of empathy isn’t sufficient to motivate the kinds of deeply harmful intergroup behaviors seen around the world. Instead, we propose that feeling schadenfreude is a more prominent motivator of intergroup harm and violence. We are expanding conversations around intergroup conflict by highlighting the importance of including schadenfreude in conjunction with empathy in intergroup conflict interventions. Our work ideally will provide the foundation for more effective intergroup conflict interventions in the future, especially those conflicts marked by hatred and subjugation. We plan to study the contextual and individual difference factors that give rise to schadenfreude in three relevant intergroup domains in America. The first aim in the proposed research explores the role of schadenfreude in promoting intergroup harm. We will assess the amount of empathy and schadenfreude people have towards outgroups as well as their support for harmful policies, asking whether schadenfreude has greater predictive power for support for harmful policies than the absence of empathy alone. The second aim tests whether perceived group threat sets the stage for individuals to experience schadenfreude toward outgroup members, which then leads to greater support for harmful policies. We will manipulate participants levels of threat towards relevant outgroups and assess levels of emotions and policy support, with a focus on reducing levels of threat and therefore reducing schadenfreude and harmful policy support. The third aim assesses whether experiencing intergroup schadenfreude not only leads individuals to support outgroup harm but to engage in it. Researchers have theorized that schadenfreude could be a potent motivator for engaging in intergroup harm because it reduces the psychological barriers to violence. However, actual research on this relationship is scant. We plan to utilize economic games to model engagement in intergroup harm, asking whether feeling schadenfreude leads individuals to become more vindictive and harmful towards outgroups. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.