The bias groups have to view their own actions as driven predominantly by love while viewing the actions of their rivals as driven more by hate has been explained by recent research conducted by a team from Northwestern University. The researchers found that in reality conflicts were driven by the same motivations, but the view from each side of a conflict was skewed–partially by psychological bias, partly by experience. The researchers also found that the bias could be removed by incentivizing a more considerate understanding using a time-honored cooperative tool–money.
“People are surprisingly motivated by the same things in conflict–wanting to do right by their own group, and wanting to show loyalty and affiliation toward their own group,” Dr Adam Waytz, Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellog School of Management and lead author of the study, told The Speaker.
“The Palestinian and Israeli conflict provides the clearest example,” Waytz told us. “I think most cases where a country decides on a violent or aggressive strategy to address conflict with another country means that they are assuming the other country is driven by hate.”
3,000 people were involved in the NU study, which included Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East and Republicans and Democrats in the US.
The research team found that each side of a conflict felt that their group was motivated by love more than hate, but each also felt that the other group was motivated by hate more than love.
“We think people misinterpret others’ motives for two related reasons. One, they are motivated to see their own group as loving and their outgroup as barbaric,” Waytz told us, referring to a theory called motive attribution asymmetry. “Two, they simply encounter less instances of their outgroup engaged in acts of love, and therefore are blind to these motives,” said Waytz.
The researchers found evidence that each group regularly saw its own members engaging in acts of “love, care and affiliation,” but rarely saw rival group members acting from similar motives. In large part, this is because groups more often notice each other’s actions during moments of heated conflict.
Rival groups often can’t see eye to eye on possible solutions or find grounds for compromise because they can’t agree on the way they perceive each other. This creates an error or bias.
“If they believed that the other country was driven by in-group love, they would see diplomacy as a more effective tactic,.” said Waytz.
“It’s interesting to see that people can be blind to the source of behavior on the other side, that you can go from saying you are motivated by love of your own group and you can’t seem to apply that to reasoning about the other side,” Liane Young, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Psychology at Boston College and co-author of the research article commented in a press release.
“What’s interesting to me is there’s so much work on social psychology suggesting we first think about who we are and what motivates us and we tend to apply that other people,” said Young. “What we’re seeing here is just the opposite where I say one thing for me and instead of extrapolating that it would be the same for you, I say it’s just the opposite for you, that you’re motivated by your hatred of my group. That’s pretty striking to me.
“What we also found was that these attributions tend to also track with other sorts of consequences so if you think that the people on the other side are motivated by their hatred of your group, you also are unwilling to negotiate with that group,” continued Young. “You tend to think they’re more unreasonable, suggesting that people’s misattributions of other groups may be the cause of intractable conflict.”
The NU team found that biases towards motive attribution asymmetry could be removed by incentivizing more considerate judgement.
When money was offered, study participants were able to correctly assess an opponent’s motivation. The promise of money for finding the right answer seemed to help study participants find that “right answer.”
“We just simply told people they would get a bonus for getting the answer right so they had to buy into this idea that there was a right answer,” said Young. “It seems like we can at least move around people’s judgments and that people aren’t so hopelessly lost that they can’t get it right when they are motivated to get it right.”
The report, “Motive Attribution Asymmetry For Love vs. Hate Drives Intractable Conflict,” was authored by Adam Waytz of Northwestern University, Jeremy Ginges of the New School of Social Research, and Liane Young of Boston College, was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.