The way we behave when threatened sometimes goes against conventional wisdom: we soften up. Andrew White, a PhD student at Arizona State University, and his colleagues analyzed data from 54 nations and found that the more a nation spent on its military (presumably a good index of perceived threat), the higher its people scored on self-report measures of how agreeable they were to others.

This trend, published in the October 2012 issue of Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes, held all the way down to the individual level: People who believe the world is a dangerous place reported being more agreeable than those who don’t.

“It is a very nice contribution to the literature on prosocial behavior,” says Paul A. M. van Lange, a social psychology professor at Vrije University Amsterdam, who was not part of this study. “Many people think in terms of mental shortcuts or heuristics: aggression leads to aggression and niceness leads to niceness. But to understand human thought and behavior, one should go deeper.”

As White continued to dig, he found there was a twist to these findings: While people do become kinder to their kin, they get nastier in the presence of strangers. Those “agreeable” people in countries with big defense budgets are less trusting of members of other nationalities or religious groups.

Threat also shapes how an individual acts towards an “out-group.” White and colleagues showed this by putting up two types of posters (threatening and nonthreatening) around their university and seeing how many students would respond to a call to volunteer for an in-group or an out-group. The threat poster depicted a large gun pointed at the viewer and encouraged students to become aware of a new law that allows guns on campus. The non-threat poster was an image of a crane and promoted awareness of new construction underway at the university. Half the gun posters had an adjacent post that asked for student volunteers for an upcoming event organized by the “Arizona Student Association.” For the other half of the gun posters, the post noted the “Ethiopian Student Association” as the coordinating body. The same was done for the construction posters. A.S.U. students were much less generous in donating their time to the out-group (Ethiopian students) and more supportive of their in-group when they saw the gun poster.

“The data seems to support the ‘circling of the wagons’ idea,” says Douglas Kenrick, co-author and lead researcher of A.S.U.’s Evolutionary Social Cognition Lab. “If we perceive there are bad guys out there that might do us harm then we’re going to be nicer to the members of our own little tribal group: our families and friends and people that are like us.”

How much we bond with “our own” when we feel threatened is also moderated by how many siblings we grew up with. In one of White’s experiments, people who had three or more siblings listened to story about an intruder entering their home or one about searching for keys in their home. People who heard the intruder story reported being much more sympathetic or unselfish toward family and friends and less agreeable towards strangers than those who heard the keys story. On the other hand, people who had only one sibling or were an only child reported they would be just as nice toward a stranger they bumped into on the street as they would towards a friend—even after they listened to the intruder story. (Because the authors used the average number of siblings to determine what was “many” versus “few” siblings in their group, the actual numbers were 3.18 siblings or more and 0.60 siblings or less.)

“One of the things that is novel and important about findings like these is that something that is seen as a basic part of your personality [such as agreeableness] actually changes in functional ways,” says co-author Adam Cohen, a social psychologist at A.S.U.

4 Comments

1. 1. rshoff 12:45 PM 1/17/13

   Well, personally, I don't know if I agree. This report is extremely superficial. Of course if we think it's a bad world, we will be on our guard. Part of being on our guard is to present a neutral front and keep our true assessment close to our chest.
   
   Feeling vulnerable makes me soften. Feeling empathy makes me soften. But being threatened hardens me. It subdues the vulnerability and the empathy quotient parts of my personality. That is a miscalculation by people like Police, TSA agents, parents, and others in a position of authority over us. They will inadvertently escalate a situation by presenting behavior that our instinctual brain perceives as a threat, and reacts to. In fact none of these people have total authority over us (perhaps legislatively only), and they must realize that as human animals, it's necessary to appeal to our sense of reason and fairness to avoid potential escalation and to leverage the area they do have control over. After all, what is their goal? Compliance or Control? I would hope their goal is compliance.

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2. 2. rshoff 12:57 PM 1/17/13

   “Many people think in terms of mental shortcuts or heuristics: aggression leads to aggression and niceness leads to niceness."
   
   But I must say, it is confusing to me that it seems the nicer I treat people (strangers and acquaintances), the harsher they are toward me. This, I have never ever figured out. It's disheartening.
   
   Maybe one size does not fit all when it comes to behavior heuristics.

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3. 3. Edward ! 11:58 AM 1/27/13

   In-group versus out-group a fact everyone remembers from adolescent and an imprimatur of tribal solidarity.

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4. 4. bucketofsquid in reply to rshoff 04:49 PM 2/1/13

   Maybe the way you are being nice pisses them off. Then again, maybe you just know way too many jerks. I grew up in a very divided and contentious family with lots of out-groups around. I always felt more welcome with them than with my own family and I still feel that way now.

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