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Journal Article

Citation

Cikara M. Curr. Opin. Behav. Sci. 2015; 3: 12-17.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.cobeha.2014.12.007

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

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, they may learn to overcome this aversion via the consistent pairing of subjective pleasure with out-group pain, thereby lowering the barrier to participating in collective violence. In neuroimaging studies, intergroup Schadenfreude is associated with engagement of ventral striatum (VS), a brain region involved in reinforcement-learning. In these experiments, VS activity predicts increased harm and decreased help toward competitive out-group members. Experiencing this pleasure-pain association in intergroup contexts is particularly pernicious because it can generalize to people who are merely affiliated with a threatening out-group, but have done nothing to provoke harm.

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