Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Article
  • Published:

Cognitive and neural bases of decision-making causing civilian casualties during intergroup conflict

Nature Human Behaviour volume 5, pages 1214–1225 (2021)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

Civilian casualties occur during military attacks. Such ‘collateral damage’ is prohibited by international laws but increases with substantial consequences when intergroup conflict escalates. Here, we investigate cognitive and neural bases of decision-making processes resulting in civilian harm, using a task that simulates punishment decision-making during intergroup conflict. We test two groups of Chinese participants in a laboratory setting, and members of two ethnic groups (Jewish and Palestinian) in Israel. The results dissociate two psychological constructs, harm preference and harm avoidance, which respectively characterize punishment decision-making related to outgroup combatants and outgroup noncombatants during intergroup conflict. In particular, individuals show decreased avoidance of harming outgroup noncombatants when conflict escalates. Brain imaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging) reveals that decreased harm avoidance is predicted by inhibition of the left middle frontal activity during selection of punishment decisions. Our findings provide insight into the cognitive and neural bases of decision-making involving civilian harm during intergroup conflict.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Fig. 1: Illustration of the procedure in experiment 1.
Fig. 2: Results of logistic regression parameter analyses in the group and individual conflict conditions in experiment 1.
Fig. 3: Results of logistic regression parameter analyses of the whole sample in experiment 2.
Fig. 4: Behavioural and fMRI results in experiment 3.
Fig. 5: fMRI results of experiment 3.

Similar content being viewed by others

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Code availability

The codes used to analyse the data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

References

  1. Reynolds, J. D. Collateral damage on the 21st century battlefield: enemy exploitation of the law of armed conflict, and the struggle for a moral high ground. Air Force Law Rev. 56, 1,101 (2005).

    Google Scholar 

  2. The 1977 Additional Protocol I of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.

  3. Eckhardt, W. Civilian deaths in wartime. Bull. Peace Proposals 20, 89–98 (1989).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Roberts, A. Lives and statistics: are 90% of war victims civilians? Survival 52, 115–136 (2010).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Voon, T. Pointing the finger: civilian casualties of NATO bombing in the Kosovo conflict. Am. U. Intl L. Rev. 16, 1083–1113 (2001).

    Google Scholar 

  6. Fragmented Lives: Humanitarian Overview 2014 (UNOCHA OPT, 2015).

  7. Seymour, B., Singer, T. & Dolan, R. The neurobiology of punishment. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 8, 300–311 (2007).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  8. Krueger, F. & Hoffman, M. The emerging neuroscience of third-party punishment. Trends Neurosci. 39, 499–501 (2016).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  9. Patil, I., Calò, M., Fornasier, F., Cushman, F. & Silani, G. The behavioral and neural basis of empathic blame. Sci. Rep. 7, 1–14 (2017).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  10. Ginther, M. R. et al. Parsing the behavioral and brain mechanisms of third-party punishment. J. Neurosci. 36, 9420–9434 (2016).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  11. Buckholtz, J. W. et al. The neural correlates of third-party punishment. Neuron 60, 930–940 (2008).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  12. Halevy, N., Bornstein, G. & Sagiv, L. “In-group love” and “out-group hate” as motives for individual participation in intergroup conflict: a new game paradigm. Psychol. Sci. 19, 405–411 (2008).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  13. De Dreu, C. K. et al. The neuropeptide oxytocin regulates parochial altruism in intergroup conflict among humans. Science 328, 1408–1411 (2010).

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  14. De Dreu, C. K. et al. In-group defense, out-group aggression, and coordination failures in intergroup conflict. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 113, 10524–10529 (2016).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  CAS  Google Scholar 

  15. Sääksvuori, L., Mappes, T. & Puurtinen, M. Costly punishment prevails in intergroup conflict. Proc. Biol. Sci. B 278, 3428–3436 (2011).

    Google Scholar 

  16. Zhang, H., Gross, J., De Dreu, C. & Ma, Y. Oxytocin promotes coordinated out-group attack during intergroup conflict in humans. eLife 8, e40698 (2019).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  17. Wolfe, R. J. & Darley, J. M. Protracted asymmetrical conflict erodes standards for avoiding civilian casualties. Peace Confl. J. Peace Psychol. 11, 55–61 (2005).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Fehr, E. & Gächter, S. Fairness and retaliation: the economics of reciprocity. J. Econ. Perspect. 14, 159–181 (2000).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Aron, A., Aron, E. N. & Smollan, D. Inclusion of other in the self scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 63, 596–612 (1992).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Peng, C. Y. J., Lee, K. L. & Ingersoll, G. M. An introduction to logistic regression analysis and reporting. J. Educ. Res 96, 3–14 (2002).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Firth, D. Bias reduction of maximum likelihood estimates. Biometrika 80, 27–38 (1993).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Kubota, J. T., Li, J., Bar-David, E., Banaji, M. R. & Phelps, E. A. The price of racial bias: intergroup negotiations in the ultimatum game. Psychol. Sci. 24, 2498–2504 (2013).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  23. Jarosz, A. F. & Wiley, J. What are the odds? A practical guide to computing and reporting Bayes factors. J. Prob. Solving 7, 2–9 (2014).

    Google Scholar 

  24. Rouhana, N. N. & Bar-Tal, D. Psychological dynamics of intractable ethnonational conflicts: the Israeli–Palestinian case. Am. Psychol. 53, 761–770 (1998).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Bekerman, Z. & Horenczyk, G. Arab–Jewish bilingual coeducation in Israel: a long‐term approach to intergroup conflict resolution. J. Soc. Issues 60, 389–404 (2004).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Shamay-Tsoory, S. G. et al. Giving peace a chance: oxytocin increases empathy to pain in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Psychoneuroendocrinology 38, 3139–3144 (2013).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  27. Feshbach, S. & Sakano, N. The structure and correlates of attitudes toward one’s nation in samples of United States and Japanese college students: a comparative study. in Patriotism in the Lives of Individuals and Nations (eds Bar-Tal, D. & Staub, E.) 91–107 (Nelson-Hall, 1997).

  28. Fan, L. et al. The Human Brainnetome atlas: a new brain atlas based on connectional architecture. Cereb. Cortex 26, 3508–3526 (2016).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  29. Fullinwider, R. K. War and innocence. Phil. Pub. Affairs 5, 90 (1975).

    Google Scholar 

  30. Coates, A. J. The Ethics of War (Manchester Univ. Press, 1997).

    Google Scholar 

  31. Schiller, B., Baumgartner, T. & Knoch, D. Intergroup bias in third-party punishment stems from both ingroup favoritism and outgroup discrimination. Evol. Hum. Behav. 35, 169–175 (2014).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Bernhard, H., Fischbacher, U. & Fehr, E. Parochial altruism in humans. Nature 442, 912–915 (2006).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  33. Delton, A. W. & Krasnow, M. M. The psychology of deterrence explains why group membership matters for third-party punishment. Evol. Hum. Behav. 38, 734–743 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Fehr, E. & Fischbacher, U. Third-party punishment and social norms. Evol. Hum. Behav. 25, 63–87 (2004).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Volle, E. et al. The functional architecture of the left posterior and lateral prefrontal cortex in humans. Cereb. Cortex 18, 2460–2469 (2008).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  36. Dixon, M. L. & Christoff, K. The lateral prefrontal cortex and complex value-based learning and decision making. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 45, 9–18 (2014).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  37. Skunde, M. et al. Neural signature of behavioural inhibition in women with bulimia nervosa. J. Psychia. Neurosci. 41, E69 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Elshout, M., Nelissen, R. M. & Van Beest, I. A prototype analysis of vengeance. Pers. Relat. 22, 502–523 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Jackson, J. C., Choi, V. K. & Gelfand, M. J. Revenge: a multilevel review and synthesis. Ann. Rev. Psychol. 70, 319–345 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Han, X. et al. A neurobiological association of revenge propensity during intergroup conflict. eLife 9, e52014 (2020).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  41. Sherif, M. Group Conflict and Cooperation (Routledge, 1966).

    Google Scholar 

  42. Stephan, W. G., & Stephan, C. W. Intergroup threat theory. in The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication (Wiley, 2017).

  43. Kteily, N., Hodson, G. & Bruneau, E. They see us as less than human: metadehumanization predicts intergroup conflict via reciprocal dehumanization. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 110, 343–370 (2016).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  44. Amodio, D. M. & Mendoza, S. A. in Handbook of Implicit Social Cognition: Measurement, Theory, and Applications (eds Gawronski, B. & Payne, B. K.) 353–374 (Guilford Press, 2010).

  45. Xu, X., Zuo, X., Wang, X. & Han, S. Do you feel my pain? Racial group membership modulates empathic neural responses. J. Neurosci. 29, 8525–8529 (2009).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  46. Hein, G., Silani, G., Preuschoff, K., Batson, C. D. & Singer, T. Neural responses to ingroup and outgroup members’ suffering predict individual differences in costly helping. Neuron 68, 149–160 (2010).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  47. Molenberghs, P. The neuroscience of in-group bias. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 37, 1530–1536 (2013).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  48. Cikara, M. & Van Bavel, J. J. The neuroscience of intergroup relations: an integrative review. Perspec. Psychol. Sci. 9, 245–274 (2014).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  49. Levy, J. et al. Adolescents growing up amidst intractable conflict attenuate brain response to pain of outgroup. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 113, 13696–13701 (2016).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  50. Han, S. Neurocognitive basis of racial ingroup bias in empathy. Trends Cogn. Sci. 22, 400–421 (2018).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  51. Rusch, H. The evolutionary interplay of intergroup conflict and altruism in humans: a review of parochial altruism theory and prospects for its extension. Proc. Biol. Sci. B 281, 20141539 (2014).

    Google Scholar 

  52. Abbink, K., Brandts, J., Herrmann, B. & Orzen, H. Intergroup conflict and intra-group punishment in an experimental contest game. Am. Econ. Rev. 100, 420–447 (2010).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  53. Battigalli, P. & Dufwenberg, M. Dynamic psychological games. J. Econ. Theory 144, 1–35 (2009).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  54. Nisbett, R. E. & Masuda, T. Culture and point of view. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 100, 11163–11170 (2003).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  55. Han, S. & Northoff, G. Culture-sensitive neural substrates of human cognition: a transcultural neuroimaging approach. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 9, 646–654 (2008).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  56. Han, S. The Sociocultural Brain: A Cultural Neuroscience Approach to Human Nature (Oxford Univ. Press, 2017).

  57. Han, S. & Ma, Y. A culture–behavior–brain loop model of human development. Trends Cogn. Sci. 19, 666–676 (2015).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  58. Ma, Y. et al. Does self-construal predict activity in the social brain network? A genetic moderation effect. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 9, 1360–1367 (2014).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  59. Luo, S. et al. Interaction between oxytocin receptor polymorphism and interdependent culture values on human empathy. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 10, 1273–1281 (2015).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  60. Buckholtz, J. W. et al. From blame to punishment: disrupting prefrontal cortex activity reveals norm enforcement mechanisms. Neuron 87, 1369–1380 (2015).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  61. Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Buchner, A. & Lang, A. G. Statistical power analyses using G*Power 3.1: Tests for correlation and regression analyses. Behav. Res. Methods 41, 1149–1160 (2009).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  62. Raftery, A. E. Bayesian model selection in social research. Sociol. Meth 25, 111–164 (1995).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (projects 31421003, 31871134 and 31661143039), the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2019YFA0707103) and the Israel Science Foundation (2510/16). We thank the National Center for Protein Sciences at Peking University for assistance with this study. The authors thank L. Zhu, J. Li, and Y. Ma for insightful discussion about experimental design and data analyses, R. Hampton for proof reading, and S. Wang for modification of Fig. 1. The funder had no role in the conceptualization, design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Xiaochun Han, Taoyu Wu, Tianyu Gao & Shihui Han

  2. PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Xiaochun Han, Taoyu Wu, Tianyu Gao & Shihui Han

  3. Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Xiaochun Han, Taoyu Wu, Tianyu Gao & Shihui Han

  4. Department of Radiology, The 7th Medical Center of PLA General Hospital, Beijing, China

    Shuai Zhou & Xinhuai Wu

  5. Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Nardine Fahoum & Simone Shamay-Tsoory

  6. Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, USA

    Michele J. Gelfand

Authors
  1. Xiaochun Han
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Shuai Zhou
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Nardine Fahoum
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Taoyu Wu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Tianyu Gao
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Simone Shamay-Tsoory
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Michele J. Gelfand
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  8. Xinhuai Wu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  9. Shihui Han
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

X.H. and S.H. conceived the research programme and designed the experiments. X.H., S.Z., N.F., T. W., T.G., S.S.-T., X.W. and S.H. carried out the experiments. X.H., N.F. and S.H. analysed the data. X.H., S.H. and S.S.-T. wrote the paper. M.J.G. reviewed and edited the paper. S.H. supervised the entire work.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Xinhuai Wu or Shihui Han.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature Human Behaviour thanks Pablo Brañas-Garza, Grit Hein, and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Jamie Horder.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Results, Supplementary Tables 1–4 and Supplementary Figs. 1–6.

Reporting Summary

Peer Review Information.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Han, X., Zhou, S., Fahoum, N. et al. Cognitive and neural bases of decision-making causing civilian casualties during intergroup conflict. Nat Hum Behav 5, 1214–1225 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01064-1

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01064-1

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing