Group Conflict

“…During conflict, the opposing group and it’s members are often perceived as ‘the other’ – strange, foreign, alien. They are characterized in simplistic exaggerated ways. Held at a psychological distance, the other becomes a screen on which it is possible to project one’s worst fears. Indeed, groups often see each other as mirror images: They see in their enemies what their enemies see in them. As Urie Bronfenbrenner (1961) discovered when he visited the former Soviet Union during the cold war, the Soviets saw Americans as aggressive, exploitative, and untrustworthy – just as Americans saw them. The same is true of Israelis and Palestinians today.

Groups often apply a double standard as well: Whatever we do is good; whatever our enemies do is bad. When Stuart Oskamp (1965) asked American college students to evaluate identical actions taken by the United States and the Soviet Union, he found that U.S. actions were evaluated more favorably than those taken by the Soviets. This double standard persisted through the 1980s among American students and, to a lesser extent, among French-Canadian students (Tobin & Eagles, 1992).

Taken to extremes, negative views of the other can result in dehumanization, the perception that people lack human qualities or are ‘subhuman.’ Based on malicious stereotypes about outgroups, dehumanization is both a consequence of hostility between groups and an incitement to inter-group conflict (Bandura, 1990; Struch & Schwartz, 1989). Aggression against the outgroup is justified by dramatization, which is used to excuse more aggression, which requires more dehumanization to justify, and so on (Bar-Tal, 1990). As the Nazis began the Holocaust, they released propaganda that characterized Jews as less than human – as rats that spread disease and needed to be exterminated. During World War II, the United States portrayed the Japanese people as cold, identical robots. At the same time, the Japanese media portrayed Americans as bloodthirsty animals, as in cartoons depicting eagles flying off with bloddied Japanese citizens in their talons.

Dehumanization is the ultimate version of ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ removing all religious and ethical constraints against the taking of human life. As George Orwell (1942) discovered during the Spanish Civil War, the cure for dehumanization is to restore the human connection. Sighting an enemy soldier holding up his trousers with both hands while running beside a nearby trench, Orwell was unable to take the easy shot: ‘I had come here to shoot at “Facists”; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a “Fascist,” he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him’ (p.254)”

Brehm, S.S., Kassin, S.M., & Fein, S. (2002). Social Psychology (5th ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. (p. 292-293)