@article{ref1,
title="Intergroup schadenfreude: motivating participation in collective violence",
journal="Current opinion in behavioral sciences",
year="2015",
author="Cikara, Mina",
volume="3",
number="",
pages="12-17",
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.<p />",
language="en",
issn="2352-1546",
doi="10.1016/j.cobeha.2014.12.007",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2014.12.007"
}