2025/11/11 by Robert Böhm, Luke Glowacki, Hannes Rusch +1 · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies #Social and Intergroup Psychology
paper · doi:10.1016/j.isci.2025.113978
= 1,121), we develop and validate a psychometric toolkit to test the core assumptions and predictions of parochial altruism models in groups involved in real conflicts of varying intensities. Our measures clearly distinguish interindividual altruism from intergroup parochialism, outperform prior metrics in capturing social preferences related to intergroup conflict, and improve predictions of individuals' conflict contributions. Notably, we find that parochialism varies for different outgroups-an unanticipated result that challenges existing theoretical models. Our work provides new tools for studying individual- and group-level social preferences in intergroup relations and presents novel evidence to inform substantive theoretical improvement.