Intergroup Schadenfreude: motivating participation in collective violence

摘要: People who identify strongly with their social groups frequently experience pleasure when they observe threatening out-group members’ misfortunes: a phenomenon termed intergroup Schadenfreude. Though people are generally averse to harming others, may learn overcome this aversion via the consistent pairing of subjective pain, thereby lowering barrier participating in collective violence. In neuroimaging studies, Schadenfreude is associated engagement ventral striatum (VS), brain region involved reinforcement-learning. these experiments, VS activity predicts increased harm and decreased help toward competitive members. Experiencing pleasure-pain association contexts particularly pernicious because it can generalize merely affiliated out-group, but have done nothing provoke harm.