YOU DON’T HAVE TO HATE OTHER GROUPS TO LOVE YOUR OWN, RESEARCHER SAYS
SAN FRANCISCO – Shiite vs. Sunni. Red state vs. Blue state. Immigrant vs. native.
While it may appear that conflict is an inevitable part of interaction between groups, research actually suggests that fighting, hating and contempt between groups is not a necessary part of human nature, according to an Ohio State University professor of psychology.
Marilyn Brewer
“There’s still this belief that a group’s cohesion depends on conflict with other groups, but the evidence doesn’t support that,” said Marilynn Brewer of Ohio State .
“Despite evidence to the contrary, you still see this theory in the research literature and in many textbooks.”
Brewer has spent much of her career studying “ingroups” – the groups we belong to – and their relations with “outgroups” – those groups to which others belong.
She discussed the nature of these intergroup relations in her invited address Saturday Aug. 18 in San Francisco at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. The address was in honor of Brewer winning the 2007 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the APA.
In her address, Brewer said recent evidence suggests that people’s attachment to their ingroups has nothing to do with conflict – or indeed any other kind of relation – to other groups.
Complete text linked below:
Source:
Research News
