Individual-Level Predictors of Intergroup Conflict: The Roles of Guilt, Shame and Empathy

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Wolf, Scott
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

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The interindividual-intergroup discontinuity effect is the tendency for intergroup interactions to be more competitive, or less cooperative, than interindividual interactions in the context of mixed-motive situations. Meta-analytic methods have shown this effect to be substantially large and robust (Wildschut, Pinter, Vevea, Insko, & Schopler, 2003). Explanations for the discontinuity effect have focused on norms, schemas, identifiability, and rationalization. Although, personality factors, in general, have received limited attention, Wildschut and Insko (2006) found that dispositional guilt of group members predicted competition in an intergroup prisoner's dilemma game (PDG) but only when group members were told that their decisions would be made public to their fellow ingroup members. The present studies sought to extend these findings by measuring guilt as well as other related personality variables (e.g., shame, empathy, and psychopathy) and assessing their relationships with intergroup competition when decisions remained private (in Study1) and when decisions were made public (in Study 2). Study 1, in which decisions remained private, showed no relationship between guilt and intergroup competition, whereas Study 2, in which decisions were made public, revealed mixed results. Possible explanations for these results are discussed.

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