Generally, threat increases the human tendency to help other in-group members. An international team lead by Martin Lang experimentally tested the influence of outgroup and environmental threats on the process of forming cohesive groups in Brazil, Japan, Mauritius, New Zealand, Singapore, and Spain.
Using a novel tool called sociometric badge, the authors measured activity, proximity between individuals, and their movement mimicry in four-person groups during a task aimed at mitigating the respective threat. Lang et al. show both cross-cultural variation in the process of forming cohesive groups as well as the effect of both threats. Women and men reacted to the threats of environmental catastrophes with increased cohesion and activity, but only men reacted to the outgroup threat of terrorism. The results are in accord with previous theories which point out that intergroup conflict is mostly a male domain, and also show how threats influence subconscious behavioral processes which help build cohesive groups.
You can find the article here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13684302211016961
Martin Lang received the Czech National Foundation’s Junior Star grant with his project titled Computing Religious Devotion: How Reinforcing Supernatural Beliefs Affects Normative Models in the Mind.
The vice-rector for Research and Doctoral Studies at Masaryk University has awarded two LEVYNA graduates - Dan Řezníček and Radim Chvaja with a price for excellent results during their Ph.D. studies.
