Social cognition in members of conflict groups: behavioural and neural responses in Arabs, Israelis and South Americans to each other's misfortunes

Abstract

In contexts of cultural conflict, people delegitimize the other group's perspective and lose compassion for the other group's suffering. These psychological biases have been empirically characterized in intergroup settings, but rarely in groups involved in active conflict. Similarly, the basic brain networks involved in recognizing others' narratives and misfortunes have been identified, but how these brain networks are modulated by intergroup conflict is largely untested. In the present study, we examined behavioural and neural responses in Arab, Israeli and South American participants while they considered the pain and suffering of individuals from each group. Arabs and Israelis reported feeling significantly less compassion for each other's pain and suffering (the 'conflict outgroup'), but did not show an ingroup bias relative to South Americans (the 'distant outgroup'). In contrast, the brain regions that respond to others' tragedies showed an ingroup bias relative to the distant outgroup but not the conflict outgroup, particularly for descriptions of emotional suffering. Over all, neural responses to conflict group members were qualitatively different from neural responses to distant group members. This is the first neuroimaging study to examine brain responses to others' suffering across both distant and conflict groups, and provides a first step towards building a foundation for the biological basis of conflict.

Figure 1.

Experimental design. Participants read 84 short verbal narratives while in the fMRI scanner. In all, 14 different stories were presented per run, interleaved with variable inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs) ranging from 2 to 12 s, over a total of six runs.

Figure 2.

Behavioural results. Each dot shows a single participant; dot shape reflects participant group. (a) The correlation between explicitly reported warmth towards Arabs and Israelis and the difference in reaction time on the IAT while pairing Israeli names with good words and Arab names with bad words, versus the reverse (Pearson's r = 0.66, p < 0.001). (b) The correlation between reported warmth towards the groups as a whole and reported compassion for individuals who are members of those groups experiencing emotional suffering (Pearson's r = 0.64, p < 0.01).

Figure 3.

Reactions to stories about physical pain (PP). Top panel, participants' ratings of the compassion they felt for the protagonist in each kind of story, divided by the group membership of the target and of the participant. Bottom panel, average percentage signal change while reading stories about PP and no-pain (control) stories, 8–20 s post-story onset, in the same participants, extracted from six group functional regions of interest (ROIs). Images on the left show the corresponding ROIs, identified based on independent data.

Figure 4.

Reactions to stories about emotional suffering. Top panel, participants' ratings of the compassion they felt for the protagonist (target) in the stories, divided across the group membership of the target and of the participant. Bottom panel, average percentage signal change while reading stories about emotional suffering and no-pain (control) stories, 8–20 s post-story onset, in the same participants, extracted from six group functional regions of interest (identified in independent data). DMPFC and VMPFC, dorsal and ventral medial prefrontal cortex; PC, precuneus; L and R TPJ, left and right temporoparietal junction; LAT, left anterior temporal.

Figure 5.

Whole brain random effects analyses: brain regions involved in representing physical pain (PP). (a) Regions showing higher responses to stories about PP than emotional suffering, for all participants and targets, including (1) cingulate, (2) left lateral occipital, (3) left insula, (4) left secondary sensory, (5) right insula and (6) right secondary sensory regions. Functional activations corrected for multiple comparisons, p < 0.05; shown on a canonical template brain. (b) Many of the same regions are recruited more during stories about South American targets' PP, than for neutral control stories about South American targets, the no-pain control condition.

Figure 6.

Whole brain random effects analyses: brain regions involved in representing emotional suffering. (a) Regions showing higher responses to stories about emotional suffering than physical pain, for all participants and targets, including (1) DMPFC, (2) VMPFC, (3) PC, (4) LTPJ, (5) RTPJ, (6) left anterior temporal and (7) right anterior temporal regions. Functional activations corrected for multiple comparisons, p < 0.05; shown on a canonical template brain. DMPFC and VMPFC, dorsal and ventral medial prefrontal cortex; PC, precuneus; L- and RTPJ, left and right temporo-parietal junction. (b) The same regions are recruited more during stories about South American targets' emotional suffering, than for neutral control stories about South American targets, the no-pain control condition.

Figure 7.

Whole brain random effects analyses: regions showing differential activity in response to stories about individuals from the ingroup and the distant outgroup. For Arab and Israeli participants only, regions responding to stories about ingroup > distant outgroup (red-yellow), and distant outgroup > ingroup (blue-green), including (i) VMPFC, (ii) PC, (iii) RTPJ, (iv) RIFG, (v) right anterior temporal lobe, (vi) left anterior temporal lobe, (vii) left sensory-motor regions, (viii) right sensory-motor regions and (ix) dorsal posterior cingulate. Functional activations corrected for multiple comparisons, p < 0.05; shown on a canonical template brain. VMPFC, ventral medial prefrontal cortex; PC, precuneus; RTPJ, right temporo-parietal junction; RIFG, right inferior frontal gyrus.

Figure 8.

Time course of responses to stories about emotional suffering. The response over the duration of the story, in four representative regions, for Arab and Israeli participants (combined). Colours indicate the relative group membership of the story protagonist: the conflict outgroup (red), the distant outgroup (green) or the participant's ingroup (blue). Black lines show the time course for the no-pain control stories. The rectangles at the bottom show approximate timing of the story, and the compassion question prompt (P; shifted to account for haemodynamic lag).