Negative responses toward outgroups across cultures

Clobert, Sasaki, Hwang & Tsai (2022) published “Valuing High Arousal Negative States Increases Negative Responses Toward Outgroups Across Cultures” in Emotion.  

Previous research demonstrates that the more people experience anger, fear, and other high arousal negative states (HAN) on average, the more prejudice and harm they express toward outgroups. Here we demonstrate that valuing HAN—above and beyond actually experiencing HAN—increases people’s likelihood of engaging in harm toward cultural outgroups in everyday life. In Study 1, U.S. European Americans (N = 227) read hypothetical scenarios in which a member of another cultural group at school, work, or home made them uncomfortable. As predicted, the more participants ideally wanted to feel HAN, the more negatively they responded to the outgroup member in these scenarios (i.e., the more HAN they felt, the more they viewed harmful actions as appropriate, and the more likely they were to engage in these actions). To assess generalizability, in Study 2, we provide evidence from Canada (n = 162) and Taiwan (n = 170) that despite cultural differences in the valuation of specific types of HAN, wanting to feel HAN still predicted negative responses toward cultural outgroups in both cultures. These findings raise the intriguing possibility that reducing people’s valuation of HAN might play an important role in increasing tolerance of cultural diversity in multicultural societies. 

I find this work intriguing since it seems that such high arousal negative (HAN) states as anger and fear have become more common in recent years, certainly impacted by the pandemic. This work suggests that intolerance for those who are other is exacerbated by HAN. The challenge for practitioners will be following Clobert et al.’s conclusion that we must find ways to reduce people’s valuation on HAN.