Harming the ‘outgroup’ linked to elevated activity in the brain reward circuitry

> The researchers had 35 male college students complete a competitive, aggressive task against either a student from their university or from what they were told was a rival university.

Male college students, an “aggressive task”, and a rival university.

College students are literally trained to associate out-competing rival universities as a fun and desirable activity. It’s the entire foundation of sports programs. This study feels like the authors tried to simulate a competitive sports program as closely as they could get away with in their lab environment and then tried to spin it as a profound observation about humanity in general.

This really just reads like “young male college students still enjoy competing against their rival university”

In otherwords, water is wet. It's very easy to see that tribal behavior is hardwired into the brain. One just has to look at history and current events to see that.

I own a sports motorcycle. One of the first things you learn at the track is that your initial instincts in certain situations are wrong because physics says so. During the course you learn to remold or even completely change your instincts.

I've often wondered what we could accomplish as a species if we could just overcome some of these hardwired / knee-jerk instincts.

We have amazing technology and could do so much more, but we're still stuck with the parts of our brain that are millions of years old.

Nothing is more important for survival and thriving than belonging to a tribe. An isolated man is a dead man.

Also, we don't need neuroscience to condescend to us like this. Isn't it obvious? Surely, most people have engaged in team sports and have felt the exhilaration of working together to overcome an enemy tribe.

This also relates to the pleasure of harming others, even those not identified as members of an 'outgroup.' It is frowned upon by society, but most people like to hurt people. Why? Because the power to harm others is the power to defend yourself against them or knock them down in the struggle for hierarchical dominance. Those who are powerless often pose as saints, but if you give them power over others, they will become monsters--like the lowly wage worker who becomes a tyrant as soon as he's placed in management. We all have a devil inside us...and it's not from us being fallen creatures, but because life must take life in order to live. Life is an endless cycle of self-consumption, life consuming life...an ouroboros eating its tail--forever.

Neitzche said the worst complement someone can receive is that they never hurt anyone. If you aren't somehow dangerous, who will care about you? What is your value in the struggle for life?

”While undergoing functional MRI, participants completed an aggression task against both an ingroup and an outgroup opponent in which their opponents repeatedly provoked them at varying levels and then participants could retaliate. Participants were then socially included and then excluded by two outgroup members and then completed the same aggression task against the same two opponents.”

I am not an expert but this seems like a dumpster fire in terms of experimental control.

This reminds me of Girard's idea that Christianity (and others I'm sure) was effective because it showed things from the victim's point of view. I'm not making the claim that it fixed everything, but it's an interesting idea nonetheless.

Each individual person is liable to become a "them" once one asserts one's individuality from the group identity. Group coalitions that do not respect individuality often fall prey to base emotions as they collectively punish individual identities. Individual creators are largely responsible for the actual work, new ideas, innovations, things...

The feedback loop described in the OP creates groupthink, politically correct culture, an abundance of blind spots, & a narrow path of evolution specifically tailored to the group's worldview. Group "whips" are given positions of power to mete out punishment against those who cross lines defined by group & interpreted by the "whip".

If one sees all models as being false, the teleological fate of the OP's group feedback loop unchecked is group delusion, irrelevance, harming a perennial ever changing subgroup of outlier individuals, & eventual collapse. The perennial ever changing subgroup of outliers individuals is necessary to feed the base emotional reward circuitry of the "in group", a necessary sacrifice to cohere the "in group", feeding the group's evolutionary descent...

Perceived morality is important for the "whip". There's always a statement of alibi & justification while the "whip" is punishing others. "For the greater good" is often an alibi to justify the emotional reward circuitry "hit" of those afflicted with these addictions

Here's the original study: https://psyarxiv.com/fj5ht/

So in effect they found the biological basis for hate?

> But why do people show such a ready tendency to harm people in opposing groups?

A new study led by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University has used functional brain imaging technology to reveal a potential answer: It increases activity in the brain’s reward network.

I think the underlying assumption here is already worth thinking about: That interpersonal and societal behaviour might be a lot more driven by instincts than we'd like to believe - and that in particular the tendency of people to structure the social landscape into "us" and "them" groups might be biologically hardwired.

The other thing I believe would be useful to study at some time would be if there is some innate biological mechanism for sadistic behaviour, which in effect "flips the sign on the reward function" when we consider an action in particular contexts - so doing harm suddenly feels good and doing good feels bad. At least, that would explain to me, why in so many situations where a person has the power to make rules that others have to follow, the rules seem to skew towards being unpleasant, even if they wouldn't have to be rationally.

I think this is nature's risk management mechanism at play. I believe nature has put a mechanism in our heads, which prevents the easy spread of global threats to humanity by dividing us (the society) to different subgroups. This division acts as a barrier for the contagion effects of different threats or at least slows them down significantly.

Let's take for example the current Crypto sale. People who invested in crypto are losing money, but fortunately nature created other individuals, who think crypto is a scam and they've never put their money on the table. They are safe compared the their peers. An example, where this mechanism has been compromised by humanity is the civil aviation and the COVID spread. If we didn't have a sophisticated and integrated civil aviation industry COVID would have had a hard time spreading around the globe so fast. 100 years earlier and the virus would have needed many more months to spread.

So, I think nature deliberately (or evolutionary) put a mechanism in our heads, where we try to protect our own group and harm the outsiders. This reinforces nature's risk management.

> The findings raise the possibility that one day treatments that disrupt the reward of intergroup aggression might help to reduce the costly and persistent human phenomenon of violence toward other groups

A little G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate should clear that right up!

>But why do people show such a ready tendency to harm people in opposing groups?

Outsiders can be conceived as threats or competition for resources. So ve evolved that way.

Recommended: Search Youtube for "Social evaluation by preverbal infants". We are basically born evil (to like people that hurt people that are not like us) and empathy (towards people that are different) is learned through society.

This is entirely unsurprising given what’s been seen in our primate cousins. They’ve been observed going to war with neighboring tribes, slaughtering all the males, slaughtering the young offspring of those makes months later, and taking the females for themselves. War, genocide, infanticide, rape…all the things we think of as “inhuman” and unnatural are practiced by our close relatives. Fighting an outgroup which shares less of your genes than your tribe seems pretty normal in nature and makes the origin of racism pretty intuitive, and yet we think of racism as some particularly Western/American cultural failure.

For many affiliations, particularly political ones, your affiliation is more based on hating the outgroup than loving the ingroup. For example, I would wager that most Republicans hate Democrats more than they love Republicans and more progressives hate conservatives more than they love progressives. You need look no further than left and right leaning news sources to see this. A left leaning news source is far more about exposing people on the right than talking about how good the left is, and vice versa.

Could be a comment to an alien report on why humanity didn't pass the great filter...

The secret to happiness

This is basically the story of the history of human beings, and of our close relatives, the chimpanzees. Escaping these (apparently) hard-wired behaviors is what education is for; humans don't have to act like animals. However, this is what humans revert to when education is dismantled, and when group-identity themes are forced on them - tribalism, nationalism, sectarian religious fanaticism, identitarianism, etc.

For example, Machiavellian types have long understood that whipping up religious fervor is a route to political power if they can be the ones who direct that aggression, and this can be applied to any religious organization, and similar in-group based ideological movements as well (communism, fascism).

It's particularly illustrative when a major religion is split by internal divisions and the two groups turn on each other with remarkable levels of savage violence, as with the Protestant-Catholic wars that raged across Europe for several hundred years, or the Sunni-Shia schism in Islam, a conflict that continues to this day and which is characterized by things like suicide bombings targeting mosques and so on. Typically you find the leaders of the various groups are political actors who work hand in hand with the priests/ministers/clerics/rabbis/preachers/ideologues to gain and consolidate political power, which, surprise, leads to the accumulation of wealth on their part. This was also a major justification for colonial European expansion in the Americas and genocidal attacks on native American populations (who, it must be said, also went to war with each other on similar grounds, see the Aztec Empire).

It's basically similar to in-group/out-group conflict in chimpanzee tribes, which is not surprising as chimps and humans share a fairly recent common ancestor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

During the four-year conflict, all males of the Kahama community were killed, effectively disbanding the community. The victorious Kasakela then expanded into further territory but were later repelled by another community of chimpanzees.

Forcing members of groups who hate each other to work together if they want to survive could be a way of ah, re-educating them... For example, take two such people, put them in a leaky rowboat out in the ocean, give one a paddle and one a bucket, and see if they can make it to shore. If they use their tools to attack each other instead of to cooperate, well... good riddance.

The Germans even have a word for it:

Schadenfreude

It comes from envy, the second deepest level in Dante’s Inferno.

Dante’s cure for envy was sewing the eyes shut.