Carsten K.W. De Dreu on "On Climate and Conflict: Carrying-Capacity Stress, Parochialism, and Intergroup Conflict"

Carsten K. W. de Dreu, Leiden (Netherlands) 

Title: "On Climate and Conflict: Carrying-Capacity Stress, Parochialism, and Intergroup Conflict" 

(with Jorg Gross, Maria Lojowska, and Lennart Reddmann)

January 22nd, 16:00 CET (GMT+1)

Registration: click here

Abstract

Peaceful co-existence and trade among human groups can be fragile and intergroup relations frequently transition to violent exchange and conflict. Here we specify how exogenous changes in groups’ environment and ensuing carrying-capacity stress can increase individual solidarity with their group, and participation in out-group aggression. I discuss findings from recent experiments on public goods provision under (physiological) stress, and from intergroup contest experiments with individuals experiencing more or less carrying-capacity stress in the form of environmental unpredictability. Environmental unpredictability, induced by threat of electric shocks (Lojowska et al., 2023) or by making non-invested resources subject to risk of destruction (versus not) (De Dreu et al., 2022), created physiological stress, increased within-group solidarity, and increased participation in attempts to aggressively steal resources from out-groups. Archival analyses of interstate conflicts showed, likewise, that sovereign states engage in revisionist warfare more when their pre-conflict economic and climatic environment was more volatile and unpredictable. Given that participation in conflict is wasteful, environmental unpredictability not only made groups more often victorious but also less wealthy. Macro-level changes in the natural and economic environment can be a root cause of out-group aggression and turn benign intergroup relations violent.