Social Groups and Adapted Minds

Contacts between people from different groups engage a variety of human competencies and motivations, from high-level representations of social categories to visceral responses when confronted with strangers, from cognitive appraisal of conflict to a desire to exclude or even attack “others.” There is a correspondingly diverse set of fields and subfields in psychology and the social sciences focusing on such specific topics as racial prejudice, in-group bias, ethnic identity, xenophobia, and nationalism. In this article, we propose a model that cuts across boundaries between these different fields to describe and explain fundamental aspects of intergroup relations. We propose that many aspects of intergroup relations should be construed as different manifestations of a coalitional psychology. We describe coalitional psychology as a set of evolved mechanisms designed to garner support from conspecifics, organize and maintain alliances, and increase an alliance’s chance of success against rival coalitions. In this perspective, the core psychological mechanisms are the same, independent of whether the alliance in question is formed as ethnic (based on perceived similarity and common origin), racial (based on ethnicity combined with phenotypic similarity), regional, or political, and so forth.