Functional Flexible Mechanisms Of Ingroup Derogation Attitudes:the Enhancement And Eliminate On Physical Violence Threat And Ingroup Derogation Attitudes

Ingroup derogation refers to a strange phenomenon that people prefer "outgroup members" rather than "ingroup members" and it is widespread.Not only in the aspect of recency this phenomenon couldn’t be explained,even from the evolutionary level it’s more difficult to understand.From the viewpoint of evolution,the research investigated the hypothesis that ingroup derogation is an evolved response of the threat management mechanism to adapt to the specific conditions that ingroup brings a greater threat of violence to people compared to outgroup.According to the hypothesis,ingroup derogation is an adaptive psychological mechanism which follows the smoke detector principle and the functional flexibility principle.Otherwise,it should be positively correlated with the perceived vulnerability to violence.What’s more,ingroup derogation may due to the reason that people perceived more vulnerability to violence from ingroup than outgroup.This hypothesis was tested across three experiments.In Experiment 1,participants were manipulated under the condition of exposed to the threat of violence.The results indicated that the participants had ingroup derogation effect.As a supplement and extension of Experiment 1,Experiment 2 discussed the influence of the threat of violence brought by the in-group and out-group members to ingroup derogation,the results found that these participants also had ingroup derogation effect.What’s more,Experiment 2 also investigated participants’ evaluation of neutral faces of ingroup and outgroup from four kinds of emotions which including “happiness” “sadness” “anger” “fear”.The results found that the participants were more easily to regard the ingroup neutral emotional face as anger and fear face,and the subjects perceived ingroup as higher threat of violence.In Experiment 3,participants were manipulated under the condition of violence protection.The results revealed that the participants showed a reduction of ingroup derogation effect compared with Experiment 1.Taken together,through a series of behavioral experiments whose participants’ group membership was manipulated by using a minimal group paradigm,the results of this study revealed the previously unexplored effects of the threat of violence on ingroup derogation attitudes.These results showed that there was a linkage between the threat management mechanism which evolved to response to violence and the ingroup derogation,which suggested the ingroup derogation effect is a specific response of threat management mechanism that ingroup bring a greater threat of violence compared to outgroup.It also provided supports for the hypothesis that ingroup derogation follows the functional flexibility principle.