Intergroup Bias Under Uncertain Environment

Cooperation is one of the themes and trends of human society,promoting cooperation and communication has become the consensus of almost everyone.However,cooperation does not come easily,and individual interests often conflict with collective interests,challenging the survival of cooperation.At such times,people need to punish violators to maintain cooperation.In recent years,third-party punishment has gradually become a hot spot in decision-making research.Third-party punishment refers to the behavior of a third party who unrelated to the event,when his interests does not be harmed,punish the violator paying some price.Although third-party punishment has been proved to promote cooperation,several studies have shown that it is also affected by factors such as group and environmental uncertainty.Previous studies have found two manifestations of inter-group third party punishment: the "in-group preference" that is more tolerant to the in-group and the "black sheep effect" that is more strict with the in-group.Environmental uncertainty,as a kind of uncertainty about the scale of resources that exists widely in the world,will blur the norms and change the third-party decision-making methods.This study explores the impact of environmental uncertainty on cross-group third-party punishment from the perspective of third party decision-making under different environments..This study,from the perspective of third-party punishment,adopts the experimental paradigm of public resource dilemma as the background of third-party rewards and punishments.It simulates the differences in response and decision-making of third parties to resource taking behavior among members of in-group and out-group under different environments,and explores the impact of environmental uncertainty and group categories on individual behavior.Study 1 mainly explored the difference of the third party punishment of internal and external group members under different environmental uncertainties.The results show that:(1)as the amount of players’ demands increases,the third party will punish them more;(2)the third party’s punishment for in-group members is always lower than the punishment for out-group members;(3)when the environment is uncertain,the third party will give more punishment;(4)experience uncertainty first will increase the amount of punishment imposed on members of the in-group by the third party in subsequent decisions,but members of out-group will not be affected by this(we call it the tendency of black sheep effect);(5)the third party thinks that in-group members will demand more.On the basis of Study 1,Study 2 added rewards as a third-party available means,further explored the impact of rewards on intergroup decision-making under different environmental uncertainties,for further exploring the psychological mechanism of third-party decision-making.The results of the study found that:(1)the third party prefers to use rewards rather than punishment,and when rewards are available,the third party reduces the punishment and only punishes players who have a higher demand;(2)the presence of rewards greatly weakens the impact of environmental uncertainty,and the tendency of the black sheep effect did nor appeared.Overall,experiments have shown that individuals exhibit duality in their behavior in complex social activities,rather than simple group preferences or black sheep effects.