Group Emotions

Historical Perspective

The exposure of Nazi atrocities in the immediate aftermath of World War II sparked a research focus on the psychological origins of prejudice, which one influential perspective traced to intense inner psychodynamic conflicts resulting in an “authoritarian personality.” This perspective focused on affective processes resulting in extreme hatred for outgroups—in other words, the psychology of the extreme bigot. These emotions were seen as irrational, targeted at convenient outgroups (as the Nazis targeted the Jews) without any basis or justification in actual intergroup experience.

However, this line of research was criticized on both conceptual and methodological grounds, and by the 1960s psychology as a whole began to undergo a “cognitive revolution,” with theories stressing information processing rather than emotion and motivation. At the same time, research attention shifted from the rare and abnormal characteristics of the extreme bigot to the more “normal” prejudices that (all too obviously) are common in large numbers of ordinary people. Influential perspectives in this period stressed that prejudice often resulted from conformity to the norms of one's own ingroup or from stereotypes (socially shared beliefs) about negative characteristics of the outgroup. Emotions played little obvious role in these models.

Beginning in the 1980s, research interest turned once again toward emotions, with a focus on people's immediate experience in intergroup encounters. Negative feelings such as anxiety and irritation were found to be provoked by encounters with others who are culturally different or belong to unfamiliar or disliked groups, as described below. Finally, in the 1990s researchers began to link emotions and group memberships in a more direct way, assuming that particular emotions can be experienced when people simply think of themselves as members of particular groups and not only in face-to-face intergroup encounters. In these more recent views, emotions related to group memberships are no longer seen only as irrationally driven by deep underlying personality conflicts. Instead they are seen as more or less adaptive and understandable, arising from such factors as conflicts or competition between groups, cultural differences, or lack of familiarity and experience with cross-group interaction. In other words, emotions are normal, and any of us is likely to experience them when reacting to members of an outgroup. Thus, emotional responses to groups are not the sole property of a few extreme, irrationally motivated bigots.

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