Spoils division rules shape aggression between natural groups

Gönül Doğan, Luke Glowacki () and Hannes Rusch ()
Additional contact information
Gönül Doğan: University of Cologne
Luke Glowacki: Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse
Hannes Rusch: Philipps-University Marburg

Nature Human Behaviour, 2018, vol. 2, issue 5, 322-326

Abstract: Abstract Violent intergroup conflicts cause widespread harm; yet, throughout human history, destructive hostilities occur time and time again1,2. Benefits that are obtainable by victorious parties include territorial expansion, deterrence and ascendency in between-group resource competition3–6. Many of these are non-excludable goods that are available to all group members, whereas participation entails substantial individual risks and costs. Thus, a collective action problem emerges, raising the question why individuals participate in such campaigns at all7–9. Distinguishing offensive and defensive intergroup aggression provides a partial answer: defensive aggression is adaptive under many circumstances10–14. However, participation in offensive aggression, such as raids or wars of conquest, still requires an explanation. Here, we focus on one condition that is hypothesized to facilitate the emergence of offensive intergroup aggression: asymmetric division of a conflict’s spoils may motivate those profiting from such inequality to initiate between-group aggression, even if doing so jeopardizes their group’s welfare15–17. We test this hypothesis by manipulating how benefits among victors are shared in a contest experiment among three Ethiopian societies whose relations are either peaceful or violent. Under equal sharing, between-group hostility increased contest contributions. By contrast, unequal sharing prompted offensive contribution strategies in privileged participants, whereas disadvantaged participants resorted to defensive strategies, both irrespective of group relations.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0338-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nathum:v:2:y:2018:i:5:d:10.1038_s41562-018-0338-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0338-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().