Intergroup Conflict

Group Perception

Intergroup conflict presupposes perception of at least two groups. This is easy when two teams meet on a sports field, with each team member marked by the team colors. Often, however, group perception is not so obvious. How do Irish Republicans know who is a Loyalist in Northern Ireland? How did Hutu know who was Tutsi in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda? How did “real” Cambodians know who were the “Cambodians with Vietnamese minds” to be exterminated in the killing fields of 1975–1979?

Intermarriage, conversion, and migration produce many individuals who cannot easily be coded in an either-or fashion. Is the son born to Muslim Algerian parents in France seen as French or Algerian? This is not a matter of what passport he holds. How do most French people see him? How do Algerians see him? How do other French citizens of Algerian origin see him? Not only are group boundaries fuzzy, but they can change over time. In the 1800s, Irish immigrants to the United States did not count as “White;” today their descendents are undeniably White.

The puzzle is why we see these fuzzy boundaries as sharp and well defined. When someone talks [Page 433]about Loyalists, or Tutsi, or Jews, only a few social scientists are likely to say that, well, actually, we don't know who you are talking about. Groups made up of uncounted millions, separated by porous and changeable boundaries, sometimes with little difference in physical appearance (Irish Republicans and Loyalists, Cambodians with and without Vietnamese minds) appear with no less clarity than two teams on a football field. The more intergroup conflict moves toward violence, the sharper and more natural group boundaries appear to be.

The capacity to see a group composed of millions of diverse individuals as a single entity, a single actor, is an aspect of human psychology that rivals the capacity for language. A child does not have to be rewarded for learning language and does not need explicit instruction from adults to learn language. Similarly, humans seem prepared to learn about groups without external reward or explicit instruction, and this group-making tendency extends to seeing ethnic, national, and religious groups with no less clarity than football teams.

Group Identification

The next puzzle has to do with caring about groups, part of a broad human capacity to care about others. Caring about family and friends seems so natural that it does not draw much attention, although the borders of who counts as “family” or “friend” can be as fuzzy as the border of nation and ethnicity. But we care also about much larger groups: our ethnic group, our religious group, our country. Unlike family and friends, these groups are too large to be known as individual persons; these are groups of strangers. Nevertheless, we often care for these anonymous groups to such a degree that we are ready to give up friends, family, and even our own lives for the welfare of the group. Sometimes we even contribute to the support of groups we are not part of, such as a football team or Darfur refugees.

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