The Price of Being Social: The Role of Emotions in Feeding and Minimizing Conflicts - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 106

ritual, the more likely they are to treat preferences as protected values (Sheikh
et al. 2012 ). Interestingly, perception of threat to the in-group accentuates the
positive relationship between members but feeds intergroup conflicts. Namely, the
creation of sacred values by connecting in-group members accentuates intergroup
conflict and disputes. Some of the greatest atrocities have been caused by groups
defending or advancing their sacred values.
What is about ritual that contributes to in-group cohesion and out-group hostility?
The hypothesis carried on in this article is that emotional arousal tied to ritual is
exactly the mechanism underlying the forces that bind groups together in opposition
to outsiders (Whitehouse 2012 ). On the one hand, emotions minimize conflict
feeding a group identity, and on the other hand, they transform the common
values in sacred values pitting the group against out-group individuals (Ginges
et al. 2007 ). As Tomasello states ( 2009 , p. 88), the better way to drive people
thinking as a group is to identify some enemies. Several experiments show that
humans from an early age quickly divide into groups and side for one's own
degrading the other ones. The in-group modality undertakes a protective role,
especially in humans that have developed what Cavalli-Sforza and Padoan ( 2013 )
call we-ness . Identifying common enemies strengthens this preference for one's
own group that becomes a strong evolutionary vehicle: it produces a partition
between friends and enemies by defining circles of we, increasingly more normative,
that are driven by different configurations of empathy. Thus, we-ness includes
both the positive and negative sides of the supremacy of we-thinking : a form of
empathy inherent to positive we-ness inclines us toward the other, perceived as
alike, whereas a destructive form leads to exclude the other that is external to
the circle. As underlined by Cavalli-Sforza and Padoan ( 2013 ), such forms of we-
ness contribute to breed ideologies like racism. Consistent with these observations,
Harris and Fiske ( 2006 ) have shown that viewing certain social groups perceived
as stranger elicits dehumanized emotions. The subjects involved in the experiment
showed to feel disgust in the face of photographs of extreme out-groups similarly
of viewing objects. The neural response supports the idea that out-groups may be
considered as less than human, in virtue of a natural tendency to prefer one's own
group.
In this sense, cooperation seems to have evolved especially to interact with the
local group, namely, has been selected in intragroup contexts. Paradoxically, this
tendency is one of the greater causes of intergroup conflicts; in other words, the
sources of cooperation are also the sources of tribalism.
A recent study by Clay and de Waal ( 2013 ) offers interesting evidence in this
direction: the authors show that social closeness facilitates empathy in both humans
and other animals. Partners sharing stronger affiliative bonds are more likely to
make repairing behaviors and to be sensitive to each other's distress. This fact
demonstrates that emotions like empathy do not work in an undifferentiated way
but are linked to the degree of social relationship: empathy does not produce a
conflict mitigation process in general, does not work universally, and does not
make us indiscriminately kind and cooperative individuals. Consistent with this
observation, for instance, Rozin and colleagues ( 1999 ) have shown that an emotion
like disgust does not work similarly toward members of the same group or toward