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Published on: October 31, 2013
The cultural contagion of conflict
Michele Gelfand1, Garriy Shteynberg, Tiane Lee
1Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA. mgelfand@umd.edu
Abstract:
Anecdotal evidence abounds that conflicts between two individuals can spread across networks to involve a multitude of others. We advance a cultural transmission model of intergroup conflict where conflict contagion is seen as a consequence of universal human traits (ingroup preference, outgroup hostility; i.e. parochial altruism) which give their strongest expression in particular cultural contexts. Qualitative interviews conducted in the Middle East, USA and Canada suggest that parochial altruism processes vary across cultural groups and are most likely to occur in collectivistic cultural contexts that have high ingroup loyalty. Implications for future neuroscience and computational research needed to understand the emergence of intergroup conflict are discussed.
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