Collective Reactions to Threat: Implications for Intergroup Conflict and for Solving Societal Crises

Social Issues and Policy Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2011, pp. 101--136

Collective Reactions to Threat: Implications forIntergroup Conflict and for Solving Societal Crises

Immo Fritsche∗University of Jena

Eva JonasUniversity of Salzburg

Thomas KesslerUniverstity of Jena

Personal and collective threat can breed ethnocentrism and intergroup conflict. Wepresent a model of group-based control to elucidate motivational underpinnings ofthese effects from a social psychological perspective. Reviewed empirical evidenceillustrates the effects of personal threat on ethnocentric attitudes. Moreover, evi-dence reveals that perceived lack of personal control of important aspects of one’slife induces people to support and defend social in-groups. This is because peopleheuristically believe that groups are homogeneous actors of shared goals that maypromise the symbolic restoration of group members’ sense of global control. Wediscuss the effects complex real-world threats (economic crises, terrorism, andclimate change) have on ethnocentric tendencies and how we explain this withinthe control model. Finally, we elaborate on implications for reducing ethnocentricthreat responses and on possible prosocial consequences of threat that may helpto solve societal crises.

When people feel threatened in times of societal or personal crises—whenthey fear losing the ground beneath their feet—they often emphasize group mem-bership, which can help them to regain a sense of control and safety. This reactionleads people to highlight established social bonds and to support their in-groups un-der conditions of threat. Often, this in-group favoritism may go hand in hand with

∗Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to PD Dr. Immo Fritsche, Lehrstuhlfur Sozialpsychologie, Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena, Humboldtstr. 11, D-07743 Jena, Germany[e-mail: [email protected]].

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102 Fritsche, Jonas, and Kessler

increased derogation of out-groups. This process could explain why intergroupconflict, ethnocentrism, or social discrimination proliferates as a consequence ofsocietal crises and personal threat.

For example, economic crises are often accompanied by the acceptance ofethnocentric policies or increased rates of xenophobia. A prominent example isthe rise of the fascist national socialist party in Germany, which has been re-lated to the emergence of economic crisis in the late 1920s and early 1930s ofthe last century (Falter, Lohmoller, De Rijke, Link, & Schumann, 1983). In fact,the percentage of voters who supported the national socialists almost perfectlycorrelates with national unemployment rates in the five elections to the Germanparliament between 1928 and 1933. Falter et al. have argued that a climate ofglobal fear and hopelessness during economic crisis had laid the foundation forextreme ethnocentric attitudes. A study using archival data in the United Statesfrom the years 1978 to 1987 yields similar results. Doty, Peterson, and Winter(1991) demonstrated that indicators of prejudice and authoritarian attitudes in-creased during years of societal crisis (1978–1982). A more recent representativesurvey study in Germany (Mansel, Endrikat & Hupping, 2006) has related the per-ceived consequences of societal crisis to prejudiced attitudes. Here, fear of losingsocioeconomic status and safety as well as perceptions of own lack of influence inthe political and societal sphere were both positively associated with racism andxenophobia.

In this article, we introduce a recently developed social psychological expla-nation of why people become more ethnocentric under threat, and we explain itsimplications for solving intergroup conflict and societal crises. Our perspectiveis based on the notion that people try to restore perceptions of global controlover their environment, which are at stake in times of threat. According to themodel of group-based control restoration, people emphasize their membershipin social groups as a largely automatic attempt to restore a subjective sense ofcontrol. Consequently, threats to control can foster ethnocentric behavior com-prising favoritism and support of in-groups and sometimes even intolerance andderogation of out-groups. However, besides these adverse consequences ethno-centric reactions to threat can also imply an increased compliance with prosocialin-group norms. This research helps to illuminate the conditions and consequencesof ethnocentric phenomena (e.g., prejudice, discrimination, or norm-compliance)by linking personal (e.g., sense of personal control) and collective (e.g., societalcrisis) levels of analysis that have traditionally been treated separately. This frame-work represents a new perspective on how to reduce intergroup conflict and fostersocially responsible behavior in times of societal crises.

In the remainder of this article, we present an overview of how social psy-chologists have investigated and explained threat effects on collective behavior.We then introduce the model of group-based control restoration, which specifiesmotivational underpinnings of threat effects and has the potential of integrating

Collective Reactions to Threat 103

previous research. We review published and unpublished evidence for this model.After that, we detail how the model helps to explain ethnocentric tendencies underconditions of complex real-world threats such as economic crisis, terrorism, orglobal climate change. Finally, we discuss possible policy measures for reducingethnocentric reactions to threat and we elaborate on the conditions under whichthreat can even have positive consequences for the enactment of prosocial, com-munity supporting behavior, such as, for example, proenvironmental action or fairtreatment of out-groups.

Threat Effects on Ethnocentric Attitudes and Behavior

Perceived threat influences a host of social psychological phenomena. Specifi-cally, people who feel threatened seem to be more prejudiced and intolerant towardothers who are different than them (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010; Duckitt,Wagner, Du Plessis, & Birum, 2002; Fein, Hoshino-Browne, Davies, & Spencer,2003; Greenberg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1997). At the same time, they dis-play greater approval of similar others and of those who support their culturalworldviews (Greenberg et al., 1997) and identify more strongly with social in-groups (Castano & Dechesne, 2005; Fritsche, Jonas, & Fankhanel, 2008). Threatleads people to support and defend their in-groups as well as derogate out-groupsunder certain conditions because group membership can buffer threat (Castano& Dechesne, 2005; Giannakakis & Fritsche, 2011). Various researchers proposethat group membership can protect people from the adverse psychological conse-quences of threat because it enhances self-esteem (Branscombe, Ellemers, Spears,& Doosje, 1999; Castano & Dechesne, 2005; Correll & Park, 2005), reducesuncertainty (Hogg, 2007; Kruglanski, Pierro, Mannetti, & De Grada, 2006), or of-fers a sense of symbolic immortality (Castano & Dechesne, 2005; Harmon-Jones,Greenberg, Solomon, & Simon, 1996; for an overview, see Correll & Park, 2005;Fritsche & Kessler, 2010). Recently, Fritsche et al. (2008) have added the notionthat membership in groups may also restore perceptions of global control. Con-sequently, it seems that people more often think and act as group members ratherthan as individual persons when they are exposed to threat. This is indicated byincreased identification with social in-groups, in-group favoritism in intergroupcomparisons, and in-group norm compliance, which has been found after peoplehad been exposed to (or reminded of) threats (e.g., Castano & Dechesne, 2005;Giannakakis & Fritsche, 2011).

Definition of Threat

Threat is a person’s perception or feeling that something aversive is go-ing to happen (Fritsche & Kessler, 2010). This quite broad conception of threatis implicitly or explicitly shared by many social psychologists who have been


investigating the relation between threat and intergroup behavior (Branscombeet al., 1999; Brewer, 1999; Greenberg et al., 1997; Riek, Mania & Gaertner, 2006;Stephan & Renfro, 2002). However, other authors have proposed a more spe-cific definition of threat. According to Blascovich and Tomaka (1996), peoplefeel threatened when they perceive that they are not able to deal effectively withactual or anticipated demands. However, when people assume that they can dealwith the demand in an effective way, they may experience a challenge insteadof a threat. For instance, people who anticipate the possibility of losing their jobmay believe that they will be able to improve the quality of their work, whichwould, in turn, improve their personal job security. Those people are likely tofeel challenged. In contrast, feelings of threat are proposed to occur in thosewho think that they will not be able to improve their work or who anticipatethat possible personal improvements would not reduce personal job insecurity(as might be the case under conditions of a national economic crisis). Although,in the present work, we use the former—broader—conception of threat as ananticipated aversive state, we agree with the work by Blascovich and Tomaka(1996) that threat intensifies when people perceive low efficacy in dealing with ademand.

Specific threats occur when the actual or anticipated state of a person’s socialor physical environment is perceived to hamper the satisfaction of the individual’sgoals, intentions, or, very broadly, his or her basic human needs. A particularthreatening event (e.g., unemployment) may impact a variety of needs, such asmaterial resource needs, needs for perceiving control, certainty about the self,or self-esteem (for an overview of basic psychological needs, see Pittman &Zeigler, 2007). People show group-related behavior because they feel that thismay satisfy their needs, at least symbolically (Fritsche & Kessler, 2010). In sum-marizing different kind of threats, Stephan and Renfro (2002; see also Stephan &Stephan, 2000) distinguish two basic kinds of threat: Realistic threat, referring tothe “physical and material well-being of the individual” (p. 198; such as income oremployment) and symbolic threat, which is about an “individual’s belief system,values, or identity” (p. 198).

People can perceive threat on either a personal or a collective level of identity(or on both; see Stephan & Renfro, 2002). For example, citizens of a countrythat faces economic crisis may fear to lose their jobs, personally. Alternatively,they could fear that their country as a whole loses economic power. Most societalcrises (e.g., economic crises, terrorist threat, or climate change) can elicit bothpersonal and collective threat. Ethnocentric tendencies can result from perceivedthreat on both levels of identity (Branscombe et al., 1999; Greenberg et al., 1997;Hogg, 2007; Riek et al., 2006; Sherman, Kinias, Major, Kim, & Prenovost, 2007;Stephan & Renfro, 2002). In this work, we focus on the consequences of personalthreat, although we will discuss the interplay of both personal and collective threatin the later sections.


Ethnocentrism as a Threat Response

Correll and Park (2005) conceive of membership in social groups as a socialresource that has the potential to satisfy various psychological needs. Thus, whenneed satisfaction is threatened, referring to group membership is one way tocope with threat. We use the term ethnocentrism (Kessler & Fritsche, in press;Sumner, 1906) to summarize various kinds of thinking and behavior indicatingthat (1) people think in line with in-group norms, standards, and scale others(individuals and groups) against them, (2) they have positive attitudes towardthe in-group, or (3) they are inclined to support or defend the in-group (oftenon the expense of derogating out-group members). For example, indicators ofethnocentrism might be that people express high in-group identification (e.g., bydecorating their car with the national flag) or that they act in a way they believetypical group members do (e.g., by styling their hair in line with cultural subgroupconventions or holding “conventional” opinions). At the same time, people mayseek to advance the in-group’s position by in-group favoring judgments or resourceallocations (in comparison to out-groups; Tajfel, Billig, Bundy, & Flament, 1971),obedience to authority, compliance with in-group norms, or aggression againstin-group deviants (Duckitt, 1989; Kreindler, 2005). They may also derogate out-groups when the out-group is perceived as itself posing a threat to the in-group(Riek et al., 2006). Various forms of personal threat have been shown to increaseethnocentrism. In the following section, we illustrate the most influential lines ofresearch in this area.

Realistic threats. Threats to the satisfaction of realistic needs are related tomaterial resources and physical integrity. In his classic work on realistic intergroupconflict, Sherif (1966) demonstrated that ethnocentric behaviors are the result ofintergroup conflict (or negative interdependence) over material resources, such asmonetary gains. Building on the notion of realistic conflict, Esses, Jackson, andArmstrong (1998; see also Esses, Dovidio, Jackson, & Armstrong, 2001) proposedand found the perception of resource stress (e.g., scarcity on the job market) toelicit prejudice and intergroup conflict. This includes negative behavior towardimmigrant out-groups who were made to appear of high competence (and thuspotential competitors on the job market). Paradoxically, host society participantsderogated immigrant groups more when the immigrants were well-educated andwilling to work hard than when immigrants appeared far less capable.1

Threats to physical integrity have the potential of increasing ethnocentric be-havior. In their research on the determinants of right wing authoritarianism (RWA)

1 More recently, Esses, Jackson, Dovidio, and Hodson (2005) proposed a “unified instrumentalmodel of group conflict,” holding that both realistic and symbolic threat to the in-group may engenderprejudice toward relevant out-groups when salient ideologies emphasize competition (such as beliefsin in-group dominance).


Duckitt et al. (2002) found that authoritarian attitudes and prejudice are predictedby perceptions that the world is a dangerous place. More specifically, there isexperimental evidence that unspecific prejudice increased in situations in whichphysical danger (Schaller, Park, & Faulkner, 2003) or crime threat (Navarrete,Kurzban, Fessler, & Kirkpatrick, 2004) was salient to participants. It has beenargued that the latter effects can be explained in terms of coalition building, whichmay have developed phylogenetically as an adaptive strategy to protect individualsin the face of threats to survival (Navarrete et al., 2004).

A different line of research has demonstrated that reminding people of theirown death (mortality salience) increases a broad variety of ethnocentric behav-iors, such as in-group identification and favoritism (Castano & Dechesne, 2005;Harmon-Jones et al., 1996), derogation of in-group critics (Greenberg et al., 1997),or compliance with in-group norms (Giannakakis & Fritsche, 2011; Jonas et al.,2008). More than 250 experiments have demonstrated various effects of mortalitysalience on social thinking and behavior (Burke et al., 2010; Niesta, Fritsche, &Jonas, 2008). Terror management theory (Greenberg et al., 1997) proposes thatpeople are able to prevent the occurrence of existential threat by highlighting thevalidity of their own cultural worldviews and by holding the belief that they live upto these cultural standards of value (i.e., self-esteem). Other researchers (Castano& Dechesne, 2005) have explicitly pointed out the role of group membership as abuffer of existential threat. According to that perspective, self-categorization as agroup member may provide a sense of immortality of the social self.

Threats to self-esteem. People like to think positively about themselves. Asthe membership in a social group is an important part of the self, people also liketo think positively about their group. This is the central idea of social identitytheory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). It explains why people strive for positive in-groupstatus as well, and why they have a basic tendency to favor in-group in comparisonto out-group members (in-group bias) in natural as well as laboratory groups—even in groups based on arbitrary criteria such as artistic preferences (Tajfelet al., 1971). However, research did not find a straightforward negative correlationbetween explicit self-esteem and in-group bias (in fact, rather the opposite seemsto be true; Aberson, Healy, & Romero, 2000; Rubin & Hewstone, 1998). Lowimplicit self-esteem and threat seem to be critical for generating increased levelsof in-group defense (Schmeichel et al., 2009).

Uncertainty threat. Other examples of threat effects on intergroup behaviorcan be found in research on the consequences of perceived uncertainty. Increas-ing subjective uncertainty by asking people to work on a task without knowingexactly what to do led to higher identification with meaningless groups and fa-voritism for other in-group members when distributing resources (Grieve & Hogg,1999). These and other results laid the empirical foundation of uncertainty-identity


theory, in which Hogg (2007) proposed that self-categorization as a group member(Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987) is a function of subjective un-certainty because groups help to reduce this threatening state. People identify withsocial groups because shared cognitive representations of “the” prototypical groupmember provide a set of attributes and rules, which help to define what kind ofthinking or conduct is appropriate for the individual (see Kruglanski et al., 2006;Van den Bos, 2009). For instance, people who face possible unemployment mayfeel uncertain about their abilities or their purpose in life. Becoming a member ofa football fan group or defining oneself as a member of a radical political groupmay reduce uncertainty as it is clear what the purpose and abilities of a footballfan (e.g., supporting the team, expert in football) or a political radical (changingsociety, expert in political ideology) are.

Summary

Threat is the perception or feeling that something aversive is going to happen.Threat can endanger the satisfaction of basic needs (e.g., for material resources,continuity of the self, self-esteem, or epistemic certainty). When threatened, peo-ple emphasize group membership and exhibit ethnocentric attitudes and behavior.Now, we turn to a motive that we suggest plays an important role in ethnocen-trism: the control motive. Although for decades, control has been one of the mostprominent constructs in motivational science (Zeigler & Pittman, 2007) it has beenwidely neglected in intergroup research. Nevertheless, control motivation seemsto be a key construct for understanding threat effects on ethnocentric behavioras intense experiences of threat (vs. challenge) have been related to the lack ofcontrol over important demands in the environment (see Blascovich & Tomaka,1996).

The Model of Group-Based Control Restoration

People need a sense of global control (Pittman & Zeigler, 2007), which is thegeneralized perception that important outcomes are contingent on one’s own willand actions (for an overview, see Skinner, 1996).2 However, often personal controlis restricted. Although most people most of the time live with the implicit beliefthat they are able to exert control (Langer, 1975), their actual control over attainingimportant life goals, such as permanent employment, romantic partnership, or evenstaying alive, is ultimately restricted. When people think about these restrictions,

2 The motive to render the world predictable has also sometimes been included in a definitionof control motivation (Pittman, 1998). However, we stick to those scholars who treat it as a distinctmotivation serving uncertainty reduction (e.g., Hogg, 2007; Van den Bos, 2009) or epistemic needs(e.g., Kruglanski et al., 2006).


their sense of global control can be threatened. Given the fragile nature of personalcontrol, people may employ alternative sources of control to imbue their selveswith a sense of global control (strategies of secondary control; Rothbaum, Weisz,& Snyder, 1982; Skinner, 2007). Here, membership in social groups and socialidentity might play an important role.

Ideal groups are perceived as homogeneous actors (Brewer, Hong, & Li, 2004)who exert control over their environment. Often the group can control what theindividual cannot. People can ascribe agency and power of the in-group to theirself when they identify as group members. High identification means that the selfis defined in terms of group membership, which implies that group attributes andactions become attributes and actions of the self (self-stereotyping; Turner et al.,1987). Control becomes group-based when “I cannot” turns into “we can” (for arelated notion of social identity as a source of personal influence, see Simon &Oakes, 2006).3 In line with the notion of group-based control, Guinote, Brown,and Fiske (2006) demonstrated that making people believe that they belonged toa majority group in society increased their perceptions of control.

We propose that defining the self and acting in terms of a homogeneous andagentic group is a subjective means to restore a generalized perception of con-trol. Consequently, threats to generalized personal control may raise ethnocentrictendencies, such as in-group identification, in-group support, and defense.

One can easily imagine societal conditions that systematically deprive peo-ple’s sense of personal control (e.g., unpredictability of professional careers,increasingly fluid relationship patterns, or terrorist threat) and as a conse-quence, might increase the importance of group attachments. This, in turn, mightlead to both more support and prosocial behaviour within selected social self-categories, but might, at the same time, increase conflict between groups withinsociety.

Central Assumptions

The central assumptions implied in the model of group-based control aresketched in Figure 1. Path (a) illustrates that as a reaction to threats to theirglobal sense of control people are assumed to increase ethnocentric tendencieswith reference to a salient social in-group. For instance, people may increasepersonal identification with the group and align their behaviour with supporting ordefending the in-group. There are multiple possible reasons why threat to personalcontrol increases these tendencies. First, acting in line with in-group norms should

3 We propose group-based control to be an identity-based and symbolic process, which is differentfrom mere interdependence and realistic mutual support within the group (Sherif, 1966). Receivingsupport from other group members is a two-sided sword if people want to perceive the self (and notothers) as having control. This is why we think that social identity rather than mere group membershipshould be critical for group-based control restoration.


Threat to sense of global control

Ethnocentric tendencies

(e.g., ingroup identification, ingroup bias, self-stereotyping,

ingroup norm compliance)

Group membership salient & relevant?

Agency heuristic applicable? (homogeneity, agency)

(a)

(b) (c)

Fig. 1. Model of group-based control restoration.

be an immediate consequence of in-group identification, mediated by cognitiveprocesses of self-stereotyping (see Turner et al., 1987). Second, group membersmay display in-group support and defense due to the motivated tendency to affirmgroup membership following threat to control. Third, people may sometimesexpect ethnocentric behavior to increase the actual capabilities of the in-group tocontrol its social and nonsocial environment. For example, it may in fact increasehomogeneity and thus agency of the in-group when people follow in-group normsand authorities and are inclined to punish fellow in-group members who do notsubscribe to in-group norms (see Kessler & Cohrs, 2008 on the adaptivenessof authoritarian attitudes). As another example, exhibiting prejudice against out-groups might justify possible inequalities in favor of the in-group (Esses et al.,1998) or out-group exploitation.

Path (b) indicates that we expect collective responses to control threats whenpeople define their self as a group member. Self-categorization should be deter-mined by both the actual social context in a situation (e.g., when people enter afootball stadium and find themselves as a supporter of one of the two teams) anda person’s readiness to adopt a specific social identity (e.g., when people have apersonal history as a fan of one of the two football teams; see Bruner, 1957). Weexpect that collective reactions to lacking control occur when group membershipis salient in a situation. In addition, threat to control may increase the initial readi-ness to affiliate with social groups and may elicit an active search for “available”social identities.

As is displayed in Path (c), collective reactions to control threat should alsodepend on whether heuristic beliefs in collective agency can be applied to thein-group. As a default, people are assumed to smoothly apply this heuristic ineveryday life and think of their groups as homogeneous agents. High in-grouphomogeneity indicates that fellow group members are likely to share people’s owngoals and values and, in addition, it lays the ground for concerted action in acommon direction. In-group agency is the group’s overall likelihood of effectivelypursuing its goals and to live in accordance with its values. Note that accordingto this definition, actual success in goal attainment is not necessary for ascribing


agency to a group, although it might be one of its most prominent indicators.However, there might be situations in which in-group homogeneity and agency arequestioned. For instance, people may learn that there is considerable disagreementand a lack of support for collective action among in-group members. This shouldincrease ethnocentric reactions to personal control as people may try to reestablishsubjective agency of the in-group (in-group defense). They may do this either bymerely asserting agency and positive distinctiveness (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) ofthe in-group or by taking action to actually improve in-group homogeneity andagency (e.g., acting in line with perceived in-group norms).

Empirical Evidence

In the following, we review published and unpublished studies that examineeach of the three paths in the model of group-based control (see Figure 1).

Path (a): Threat to control increases ethnocentric reactions. For people whoperceive low control over the important aspects in their environment, belongingto social in-groups should be comforting. This is why ethnocentric tendencies in-crease following control threat. Two survey studies provide initial support for thisassumption by revealing a negative correlation of perceived control with both prej-udice and authoritarianism. Authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1996) describes threerelated kinds of ethnocentric attitudinal tendencies (conventionalism, obedienceto authority, and authoritarian aggression against deviant individuals or groups)which have been ascribed a group-serving function (Kessler & Cohrs, 2008;Kreindler, 2005) as they contribute to the preservation of group norms. Thus, au-thoritarian behaviors contribute to the establishment and preservation of in-groupcohesion and agency—group features that we assume to lay the foundation forgroup-based control restoration. In a representative Polish sample (Bilewicz &Fritsche, 2009), those participants who reported a lack of control over events intheir life displayed higher degrees of authoritarianism and distanced themselvesmost from national minorities. Agroskin and Jonas (2010) observed a similarpattern for a mixed Austrian and German sample. Low perceived control in thesociopolitical domain (e.g., with regard to the uncontrollable nature of the inter-national economic crisis of the years 2008 and 2009) was associated with higherauthoritarian attitudes, prejudice against out-groups, and global ethnocentrism(Bizumic, Duckitt, Popadic, Dru, & Krauss, 2009).

Correlational studies are only a first step in testing causal hypotheses. Bymanipulating perceived control and assigning participants randomly to differentexperimental groups, it is possible to test for the causal effect of control on ethno-centrism. In an experiment, Fritsche et al. (2011, study 1) randomly assigned uni-versity students to one of two versions of a questionnaire. Participants were askedto put themselves in the shoes of a young female academic who was described


as suffering long-term unemployment. Depending on experimental condition, thewoman’s situation was either described as having been set off due to economiccrisis (low control) or having quit her last job herself because she wanted to takesome time out to find herself (increased control). Those participants who had beeninduced to think about the uncontrollable aspects of slipping into unemploymentdisplayed more in-group bias in evaluations of East and West Germans than thosewho had been reminded of the potential to control one’s own unemployment.This finding confirms the basic causal assumption that threat to control increasesethnocentric tendencies (Path a). Other evidence comes from a line of researchin which Fritsche et al. (2008) reinterpreted the above-mentioned effects of mor-tality salience on ethnocentric tendencies (Greenberg et al., 1997) in terms ofgroup-based control restoration.

Control threat as an explanation of mortality salience effects. The inevitabil-ity of death may represent one of the most impressive reminders that hu-mans’ control is finite (Fritsche et al., 2008; Fritsche, Koranyi, Beyer, Jonas, &Fleischmann, 2009). Therefore, a control approach might parsimoniously explainthe findings from mortality salience studies. To provide evidence for a controlexplanation of terror management effects on ethnocentric behavior Fritsche etal. (2008, studies 1–3) showed that the effects of mortality salience were elim-inated when people had been reminded of the possibility to exert partial con-trol over their death (self-determined death). In other words, the salience ofuncontrollable death increases ethnocentric responses in comparison to experi-mental conditions in which self-determined death or a neutral aversive topic wassalient.

To further support the hypothesis that not thinking about death per se butthinking about uncontrollability increased ethnocentric tendencies, Fritsche et al.(2008, study 6) focused on a different area of fragile control: relationship main-tenance. The authors manipulated the salience of control in two different con-texts, namely death and relationship loss. To manipulate control over death, theyeither reminded participants about their own death or about the possibility ofself-determined death. In the context of relationship loss, they reminded partic-ipants of the possibility that their beloved partner would intend to break off therelationship. As the manipulation of control, participants were either asked toimagine that in this situation they would end the relationship with their partnerthemselves (high control) or that they would be left by their partner (low con-trol). Afterwards, as a measure of ethnocentric behavior, participants indicatedhow much they would be willing to support their favorite political party. Theresults showed that across contexts salient lack of control increased party support.Furthermore, a measure of group-based control motivation (“If you were to sup-port your party, would you have a feeling of ‘together we are strong’?”) partiallymediated the effect of lacking control on party support (see Figure 2).


Fig. 2. Group-based control motivation partially mediates the effect of lack of control salience onparty support; β coefficients from multiple regression analyses; based on data by Fritsche et al. (2008,study 6).

Are the effects of control threat unique?. The model of group-based controlcan explain previous findings of ethnocentric reactions to reminders of death. Anadditional strategy for reconciling a new model with previous theorizing is toshow that its effects are unique and cannot be explained by existing approaches.Effects of lacking control on defensive thinking have sometimes been interpretedas effects of uncertainty (Kay, Gaucher, Napier, Callan, & Laurin, 2008; Van denBos, 2001). Indeed, control negatively relates to uncertainty (Baker & Stephenson,2000). To investigate whether effects of control are indeed unique and independentof uncertainty, Fritsche et al. (2011; study 2) manipulated both uncertainty and lackof control salience independently in one study. Participants were made to thinkabout an unemployed male academic who had either been fired or had quit hislast job himself, which represented the experimental manipulation of control. Tomanipulate uncertainty, the same people were either informed that the person felthighly uncertain about himself, his abilities and his preferences (high uncertaintycondition) or it was stressed that he still felt absolutely certain about himself(high certainty condition). Confirming the assumption of independent effects,both uncertainty and lack of control increased in-group bias in East and WestGerman students. Of importance, control salience effects were not reduced whenlow uncertainty was salient indicating that low uncertainty cannot compensate forperceptions of lacking control. Thus, ethnocentric thinking under control threat islikely to represent a unique reaction to the experience of lacking control, whichmight be understood in terms of group-based control restoration.

Path (b): Groups have to be personally relevant. We have reviewed evidenceshowing that ethnocentric tendencies are increased by threats to control in variouscontexts, such as imagined death, relationship loss, and unemployment (Path a).The model of group-based control further proposes that these effects should onlyoccur when a social in-group is both salient and subjectively relevant in a situation(Path b). This proposition has been directly tested in a field experiment (Fritscheet al., 2011) at the European Football Championships. Croatian, Austrian, and


German spectators were either asked to write about aspects of their life thatmade them feel powerless or of those that made them feel powerful. As expected,the participants displayed higher levels of national in-group bias after thinkingabout feeling powerless (than when thinking about being powerful). However, ofimportance, this effect only occurred for those participants high in identificationwith their own nation but not for those low in identification.

These results show that group-based control restoration is limited to groupsthat have some a priori relevance for people in defining the self. This is impor-tant for explaining why threat does not lead people to cling to any group. In-stead, people should have their individually preferred group memberships, whichthey invoke under conditions of threat (see Greenberg & Jonas, 2003). For in-stance, threat may induce nationalists to become more nationalistic, whereas left-wing people may become more inclined to support and defend leftist groups andideology.

Path (c): Threats to collective agency exaggerate the effects of lacking control.As we have demonstrated the effects of threat to personal control on ethnocentrism,we pursue the question about the role collective threats may play for ethnocentricattitudes and social conflict. Following the model of group-based control, groupmembership may restore a subjective sense of global control because groups areheuristically perceived as homogeneous agents in the service of shared goals.Thus, when homogeneity or agency of the in-group is questioned, collective con-trol is under threat. This might increase the overall level of threat experienced bypeople whose perceptions of personal control are shaken anyway, possibly lead-ing to exaggerated defense of the in-group. Hence, collective threat to in-grouphomogeneity and agency may catalyze the effects of personal control threat onethnocentric reactions (Path c).

A field experiment supports this hypothesis (Fritsche et al., 2011; study 5).Members of a local human rights group were asked to describe the differencesbetween members of their group and in how far each group member pursuesher/his merely personal goals (high collective threat). They were compared to par-ticipants in two other conditions who had to think about within-group similarityand high collective agency (low collective threat) or who received some neutralquestions about their group. After a manipulation of global threat to personalcontrol (writing either about being powerful or powerless), participants indicatedtheir intentions to perform several proorganizational behaviors, such as signinga petition or organizing a public information booth. In line with our reasoning,participants were most ready to support the group when threat to both personal andcollective control was present. In addition, threat to control increased proorgani-zational intentions only when the integrity of the organization was threatened. Asecond experiment conceptually replicated these results with artificially generatedgroups in the laboratory (Fritsche et al., 2011; study 4).


These findings indicate that under threat to control people value groups thatappear to be cohesive agents. This is why they react particularly fierce whenboth personal control and the homogeneity or agency of the in-group are at stake(double threat). By contrast, the effects of personal threat on ethnocentric reactionscan be mitigated by making group homogeneity and agency salient. This adds toa body of research showing increased ethnocentric reactions to collective threat(for reviews, see Branscombe et al., 1999; Fritsche & Kessler, 2010; Riek et al.,2006; Stephan & Renfro, 2002). Taking into account the catalyzing effects ofsimultaneous threat on the personal level should increase our ability to predictwhen collective threat leads to intense reactions of in-group support and defense.Societal crises that threaten both the sense of personal control of individual citizensas well as they undermine cohesiveness of social networks, may elicit the highestamount of social conflict and hostility. From a different angle, people who perceivethreats to personal control in their everyday life may be those who most eagerlystrive for collective welfare and cohesion within their groups.

Of course, increasing ethnocentric tendencies and actions is not the onlyway in which people may respond to double threat. Drawing on the literatureon coping with low in-group status (Ellemers, Van Knippenberg, De Vries, &Wilke, 1988; Wright & Lubensky, 2009; Wright, Taylor, & Moghaddam, 1990)one may infer that collective status threat can also lead to distancing from thegroup and reduced group supporting action. This seems to be true for membersof low-status groups when alternative high-status groups or identities are salientand people perceive that leaving the low-status group for the high-status groupwould be easy (Ellemers et al., 1988; Wright et al., 1990). Derks, Van Laar, andEllemers (2009) showed that distancing from low-status groups was strongestwhen initial identification with the in-group was low. With regard to the effects ofpersonal threat, Dechesne, Janssen, and Van Knippenberg (2000) demonstratedthat mortality salience increased students’ identification with their university afterit had been criticized only when perceived permeability of group boundaries wasmade to be low (changing university was said to be difficult). However, mortalitysalience reduced identification with the threatened in-group when permeabilitywas high.

For situations in which threat to both personal and collective control is high,we may infer that people will not always exaggerate ethnocentric or collectiveresponses. Instead, they may sometimes distance from threatened groups andswitch to alternative collective identities that may be better suited to providea sense of collective control (e.g., a human rights activist who perceives lowpersonal control and is faced with threatened collective agency may reduce hercommitment to her human rights group and join a different, more agentic, politicalaction group; or, as a different example, low control people who perceive that thestrength and cohesiveness of their own country is under threat may highlight theirneighborhood identity, instead). However, distancing from the salient in-group


should only occur when alternative identities (e.g., the neighborhood) are salient,group boundaries are permeable (e.g., when it is easy for a human rights activistto leave her group and to join a different political action group), and initial in-group identification is low. In any other cases, double threat to both personal andcollective control should elicit pronounced ethnocentric responses.

Summary

Summing up, correlational and experimental research indicates that threatsto personal control increase in-group support and defense (Path a). They do thisprimarily when the in-group is personally relevant in a situation (Path b) and whenthe integrity of a valued in-group is under threat (Path c). This lends considerablesupport to the model of group-based control depicted in Figure 1. Furthermore,it shows that the model adds a new and distinct perspective to previous theoriesof how basic motives affect collective cognition and behavior, such as uncertaintyreduction (Hogg, 2007), or management of existential threat (Greenberg et al.,1997). The model of group-based control complements this research and may pavethe way for integrating some of the previous findings and models on ethnocentricreactions to threat.

After reviewing basic research on the effects threat to personal control canhave on ethnocentric tendencies, such as in-group support or out-group deroga-tion, we now turn to the question of whether phenomena of group-based controlrestoration can explain reactions to complex societal threats and implications forthe prevention of social conflict and the management of societal crises.

The Effects of Complex Societal Threats

Societal crises can threaten individuals on both the personal and the collectivelevel. Therefore, they may increase ethnocentric tendencies in people’s thinkingand behavior. To illustrate the implications of the group-based control approach forunderstanding collective reactions to actual and future societal crises, we discussthe effects of societal crises with reference to three actual examples: economiccrisis, terrorism, and climate change.

Economic Crises and Threat of Unemployment

Economic crises have been associated with increased ethnocentrism in so-cieties (Doty et al., 1991). Xenophobic crimes dramatically increased in EastGermany in the early 1990s when the transformation of the former socialist econ-omy caused a wave of mass unemployment. As a further example, and as notedearlier, during the rise of the fascists in Germany, the national socialists took powerin a period of economic instability and high rates of unemployment.


Although there seems to be a close relation between unemployment and right-wing voting, sociological research warns that this association is not as straight-forward as one may assume. For instance, a more detailed analysis of Germanvoting data of the years 1932 and 1933 by Falter et al. (1983) suggests that thenational socialists received their best results not among the actually unemployedbut among salaried employees. More recent investigations did not find a correla-tion of actual personal employment status and voting for xenophobic right-wingparties (Wagner, 1998). Obviously, a more detailed analysis of the psychologi-cal processes of increasing xenophobic attitudes in times of societal crises (Dotyet al., 1991) is necessary. From the perspective of group-based control, there areleast two viable explanations of why these recent studies may not have found arelationship between actual unemployment and voting behavior.

As a first explanation, economic crises may not only threaten the controlbeliefs of those people who are actually affected by the crisis, such as unem-ployed people (Layton, 1987). Instead, threat should also be present for thosewho recognize the mere possibility of becoming unemployed in the future. Thus,ethnocentric tendencies induced by threat might proliferate not only among theactually unemployed but among all people who fear uncontrollable unemploymentduring economic crises. This is evident in the above-mentioned results by Fritscheet al. (2011, studies 1 and 2), who found that merely thinking about possible futureunemployment as uncontrollable increased ethnocentric judgments in universitystudents (for similar results, see Greenaway, Louis, Hornsey, & Jones, 2010).Furthermore, impressions of global uncontrollability in the political and socioe-conomic sphere predicted ethnocentric attitudes such as authoritarianism, racism,and xenophobia (Agroskin & Jonas, 2010; Mansel et al., 2006). In line with theseconsiderations, Falter et al. (1983) explained the rise of the Nazi party in early20th century Germany by a widespread societal climate of fear and hopelessness,instead of actual personal unemployment experiences.

The second explanation of the missing effect of actual unemployment onright-wing votes is about the target of ethnocentric reactions under threat. Ex-periencing a threat to control should lead people to support and defend relevantin-groups. Under these conditions, right-wing people may increase their supportfor right-wing parties whereas left-wing people may more strongly support left-wing parties. Falter et al.’s (1983) historical analysis of German election data isconsistent with this approach. Splitting electoral districts into those in which un-employment was high among workers and those where unemployment was highamong white-collar employees revealed an increased preference for the Nazi partyin the latter districts. However, in those districts in which unemployment was highamong workers, most people voted for the communists. White-collar employ-ees’ and workers’ responses to unemployment threat differed: Whereas white-collar employees radicalized toward the right wing, workers displayed more left-wing extremism. This is fully in line with a group-based control account, which


predicts that threat causes people to stick more strongly to personally relevantgroups. Given the strong ties between workers and the left-wing parties at thattime, voting for the communist party was an expression of workers’ ethnocen-trism increased under unemployment threat. This suggests that threat effects onincreasing ethnocentrism are position-specific (Greenberg & Jonas, 2003) and agroup-based phenomenon (Fritsche et al., 2008). This qualifies the popular as-sumption that threats to a national economy always lead to a political shift to theright. Instead, all parties and interest groups may profit from economic crisis asthey may be better able to mobilize their supporters.

The possibility of personal unemployment is of course only one facet of theadverse consequences economic crises can bring about. However, this exampleillustrates the possible sociopsychological consequences of economic crises. Theycan restrict perceptions of personal control when people perceive their own fateto be dependent on external forces, such as “the economy” or powerful eco-nomic agents like finance companies or multinational corporations rather than onthemselves. These perceptions have been demonstrated to increase ethnocentricthinking and prejudice (Agroskin & Jonas, 2010; Mansel et al., 2006).

Terrorist Threat

A further example of societal crises increasing ethnocentric tendencies in apopulation is terrorist threat. Since the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York andWashington and various later bombings by Islamist terrorist groups around theworld (e.g., Madrid, London, Bali, and Mumbai), terrorist threat is on the politicalagenda of many societies. At the same time, heightened perceptions of personaland collective threat are reported on the level of individual citizens (Doosje,Zimmermann, Kupper, Zick, & Meertens, 2009). However, terrorism not onlythreatens people and societies in a direct way but also has indirect effects onthe political and social climate in a country. Shortly after the 9/11 incidents, theU.S. government tightened immigration laws and began two wars in the MiddleEast that were said to serve a “war on terror.” Even nine years after the terroristattacks on the World Trade Center, recently 63% of New York voters opposedthe plan to establish a mosque close to ground zero although 64% recognizedthe constitutional right to build it (Simon, 2010; for a summary of research onanti-Arab attitudes in the aftermath of 9/11, see Panagopoulos, 2006).

Specific reactions to terrorist threat. Psychological research has found ampleevidence that perceived terrorist threat increases people’s endorsement of policymeasures that arguably serve antiterrorist purposes. For example, in U.S.-widesurvey studies between October 2001 and March 2002, Huddy, Feldman, Taber,and Lahav (2005) found a high positive correlation of perceived terrorist threatand the approval of President Bush, the invasion of Afghanistan, and various


antiterror measures directed against both Arab travelers and Arab citizen. In anexperimental study, Landau and colleagues (2004) found that reminding U.S.university students either of the events on 9/11 or of their own death increasedtheir approval of President Bush’s war on terror and the invasion of Iraq comparedto participants who had been reminded of an upcoming exam. In this study,the effects occurred irrespective of whether the respondents had characterizedthemselves as conservative or liberal.

However, there are other studies suggesting that the effects of terrorist threaton approval of strict antiterror measures are most pronounced in people subscrib-ing to conservative ideologies (Pyszczynski et al., 2006) and holding authoritarianattitudes (Cohrs, Kielmann, Maes, & Moschner, 2005). Obviously, subjectiveperceptions of terrorist threat can increase approval of “antiterror measures.”In addition, terrorist threat has also shown to worsen global attitudes towardArabs and Muslims. These groups are often associated with Islamist terrorismby non-Muslim people (Fischer, Greitemeyer, & Kastenmuller, 2007). Thus, in arepresentative survey study across nine European countries Doosje et al. (2009)found that perceived terrorist threat increased both blatant prejudice and discrim-ination toward Muslims.

Unspecific ethnocentrism as a response to terrorist threat. Are the effectsof terrorist threat on attitudes toward antiterror measures or out-groups who areassociated with terrorism only a problem-oriented specific strategy to prevent fu-ture terrorism or are they an expression of an unspecific ethnocentric response tothreat? There is increasing evidence for the latter possibility. In a series of studiesby Fischer, Greitemeyer, Kastenmuller, Frey, and Oßwald (2007), people who hadbeen told that terrorist threat was high assigned higher levels of punishment toperpetrators who were accused of crimes unrelated to terrorism (car theft or rape)compared to people who were made to believe that threat would be low. In amore recent experiment, Fischer et al. (in press) found similar effects of terror-ist threat salience increasing authoritarian parenting. As an explanation of theseeffects, Fischer et al. (2007) suggest that global punishment inclinations increasebecause people are trying to restore a social order threatened by terrorists. Otherexperimental studies also indicate that the salience of terrorism increases globalrather than problem-specific tendencies of ethnocentrism, such as authoritarianattitudes (Jugert & Hiemisch, 2005) or the justification of one’s own country’s so-ciopolitical system (Ullrich & Cohrs, 2007). Moskalenko, McCauley, and Rozin(2006) found more direct evidence for increased importance of social in-groupsunder conditions of terrorist threat. U.S. students who had been interviewed fourdays after the attacks of 9/11 reported higher identification with their universityand their nation, showed higher explicit in-group bias, and they perceived a higherconsensus within their nation than students who were interviewed six monthsbefore or 18 months after the attacks.


Death or control? Explanations of terrorist threat effects on ethnocentrism.How can we explain increased ethnocentric tendencies after terrorist threat inpsychological terms? Terrorism seems to be quite effective in spreading percep-tions of threat in societies. For the possible targets of terrorism, affirming groupmembership and supporting the in-group might be a means of coping with thisthreat as groups represent a social resource (Correll & Park, 2005). They providethe fulfillment of basic needs whose satisfaction might be threatened by terrorism.

Some scholars have argued that terrorist threat receives its power throughexplicitly threatening the lives of people (Niesta et al., 2008). As we know fromterror management research (Greenberg et al., 1997), reminders of mortality in-crease ethnocentrism. Indeed, reminders of terrorist attacks show parallel effects(Landau et al., 2004; Pyszczynski et al., 2006). Furthermore, in one of the stud-ies by Landau and colleagues, it was demonstrated that subtle reminders of the9/11 attacks increased the accessibility of death-related thoughts. Specifically,participants who had been presented with written stimuli that were associatedwith the attacks (“911,” “WTC”) were more strongly inclined to complete neu-tral word fragments by death-related words (e.g., completing “C O F F _ _”: as“coffin” instead of “coffee”) than those who had received a neutral stimulus(“573”; for a conceptual replication, see Das, Bushman, Bezemer, Kerkhof, &Vermeulen, 2009). Although there are some indications that thoughts about deathare associated with terrorist threat, which may explain ethnocentric responses, thismight not be the whole story.

In fact, the probability of becoming an immediate victim of a terrorist acthas always been extremely small (Townshend, 2002). Instead, a more insidiousaspect of terrorism is that the time and place of attacks are neither predictablenor controllable for the possible victims. It could happen to anyone at any time.External forces determine whether people will live or die. This may make terroristthreat primarily a threat to people’s global sense of control. In line with thisinterpretation, Fischer et al. (2006) found that German participants who had beeninterviewed on the day of a fatal terrorist attack in Istanbul, Turkey, reportedboth lower levels of perceived control and less positive mood than a sample thatwas interviewed two months later. Interestingly, this was only true for peoplewho were low on religiousness. The mood of people who were highly identifiedwith a religious group was less affected by the terrorist incident. Even moreso, statistically, the preservation of control beliefs after threat fully explains thatreligiousness reduced negative mood under salient terrorist threat. The resultsindicate that religious affiliation can help people to maintain or restore a globalsense of control in the face of terrorist threat, which supports the group-basedcontrol account. According to this approach, membership in homogeneous andagentic groups, such as religious groups, buffers the effects of threat on perceivedcontrol. In addition, religious beliefs alone may be well suited to reestablish asense of control as they often entail the idea of supernatural agents acting on


behalf of people’s own wishes (Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006) of giving order to achaotic universe (Kay et al., 2008).

Over and above being a threat to personal existence and control, terrorismis a collective threat. Pyszczynski, Rothschild, and Abdollahi (2008) have ar-gued that the existence of terrorism threatens people’s confidence in their culture.Furthermore, people may be concerned that their country loses power and thatimportant collective values are at stake. Although empirically it is not easy todistinguish between personal and collective threat elicited under conditions of ter-rorism, recognition of the “double threat” nature of terrorism is important to under-stand the extremely fierce ethnocentric responses. As mentioned earlier (Fritscheet al., 2011, studies 4 and 5), the most extreme ethnocentric responses (out-groupderogation and in-group support) were observed when personal threat to controland threat to in-group integrity were combined. This is because under condi-tions of double threat, collective structures are at stake when people need themmost.

Summing up, perceptions of terrorist threat have been observed to increasenot only people’s approval of antiterror measures and the discrimination of out-groups, which are often associated with the source of terrorism. In addition,they foster unspecific ethnocentric reactions, such as authoritarian attitudes, theidentification with social in-groups, and in-group bias. We have argued for agroup-based explanation, building on evidence that group memberships mayserve as a social resource for coping with threats to existence and control. Ter-rorist threat may have a strong impact on social defensiveness because of itsdouble threat nature, which targets the integrity of both the individual and thegroup.

Climate Change Threat

Societal crises are often complex and their impact on people’s thinking andbehavior can be indirect and mediated by various social and psychological pro-cesses. This is in particular true for one of the most forceful threats humanitymay have ever faced. There is huge agreement among geoscientists that becauseof human impact the earth’s climate will rapidly change in the future and willthreaten the survival of human civilizations (IPCC, 2007). Despite its enormousmagnitude, the psychological consequences of climate change threat have rarelybeen investigated. Moreover, psychological research on how this global threatmay fuel intergroup conflict is virtually missing (for research on other psycholog-ical research related to climate change, see American Psychological Association,2009). However, we urgently need research on the sociopsychological impactof climate change. It will have to complement ongoing research in other socialsciences (Burke, Miguel, Satyanath, Dykema, & Lobell, 2009; Schubert et al.,2008) that has been focusing on changing structural conditions, such as scarcity


of natural resources such as water, arable land, or living space, which then mayfoster social conflict and war.

As a first attempt to estimate the risk of climate change related phenom-ena increasing people’s inclination to social conflict, experimental studies byFritsche, Cohrs, Kessler, and Bauer (2011) have investigated the effects of climatechange threat on authoritarian tendencies and the derogation of deviant out-groups.German and British university students read about facts on nature and society oftheir home country. Some were presented with threatening consequences of cli-mate change such as health risks (e.g., due to heat waves), damage to the environ-ment (e.g., increased risk of fires as a consequence of droughts), or economic costs(e.g., vanishing of winter sports from the German low mountain range; increasednumber of coastal and river floods). In the control group, they read about neutralfacts, which did not mention climate change. In both the German and the Britishsample, the salience of climate change threat increased authoritarian attitudes.In addition, the derogation of system threatening groups (e.g., drug addicts anduneducable teens) and the support of system supporting groups (e.g., police of-ficers and honorary workers) increased under climate change threat. Obviously,climate change threat induces people to support and defend existing norms of theircultural group, which increases conflict with deviating groups within society.

This research should be a starting point for a more systematic investigationof rather subtle social psychological consequences of climate change. Yet, wecan only speculate about the motivational processes underlying the effects ofclimate change threat on ethnocentrism. Group-based control restoration might beone way to explain these phenomena. Like other societal crises, climate changecan threaten both perceptions of personal control and collective integrity. Forexample, people living close to rivers or low coastlines may realize that their ownfate is becoming increasingly dependent on unpredictable and extreme weatherevents (e.g., heavy rainfalls) increasing the likelihood of river floods or heavystorms causing the flooding of the coast. At the same time, climate change mayincreasingly destabilize groups and societies, which may experience resourcescarcity and malicious inner social conflict as consequences of natural disasters,such as, for instance, the river flood in Pakistan, 2010. This may generate criticalsituations in which people desire subjective protection in groups that are actuallylosing cohesion and agency. This double threat to control perceptions (individualand group) may lead to extreme ethnocentric reactions.

Investigating the subtle social psychological impact of climate change is par-ticularly important as it complements research in other social sciences, which hasfocused on changing sociostructural conditions rather than internal psychologicalprocesses and states. However, the latter may catalyze the existing effects climatechange induced structural changes have on the proliferation of severe intergroupconflicts (Burke et al., 2009, Schubert et al., 2008). For instance, the loss of arableor inhabitable land due to climate change may increase international migration,


which in turn increases the structural preconditions for intergroup conflict in hostsocieties. However, these conflicts might be further increased by the subtle impactof climate change threat increasing ethnocentrism and intolerance toward differentothers. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate both sociostructural and social psy-chological processes to properly estimate the risk of climate change phenomenato elicit severe intergroup conflict and war.

One may further speculate about the consequences that conservative shiftsfollowing climate change threats may have for the ability of groups and soci-eties to adapt their behavior to conditions of climate change. Reducing climatechange implies that people have to change their habits and counteract conventionalways of living (e.g., reducing household energy use, buying cars with less pow-erful engines, or even doing without a private car). However, perceived climatechange threat may undermine such endeavors. As ethnocentrism increases underconditions of threat, people will become more conventional. This may preventtraditional behavior patterns from changing. We will discuss the role of socialnorms for directing people’s behavior under threat in the following final sectionsof this article.

Summary

We have discussed the impact that complex societal threats can have on theproliferation of ethnocentrism and intergroup conflict. For all of our examplesof societal crises (economic crises, terrorist threat, and climate change) there isevidence that reflecting on threats that are associated with these crises can in-crease people’s ethnocentric tendencies, such as authoritarian attitudes, in-groupidentification, or out-group derogation. We have attempted to explain these re-sponses within a social psychological perspective focusing on the consequencesof personal and collective threat for intergroup behavior. More specifically, wehave argued for a control restoration account of the present findings, suggestingthat ethnocentric responses to threat are subjective means to restore a global senseof control, which becomes fragile under conditions of threat.

How to Reduce Social Conflict under Conditions of Threat?

We now discuss possible strategies to reduce intergroup conflict under condi-tions of personal or collective threat. These may inspire respective policy measuresand inform the development of effective interventions to improve intergroup atti-tudes and tolerance. As critical starting points for interventions, we first discusspossibilities of reducing threat by increasing perceptions of control. Then, we turnto conditions under which adverse ethnocentric reactions to control threat can bereduced or even redirected into responses that serve and benefit society.


Empowerment, Freedom, and Control

People can experience threat to a generalized sense of control due to a varietyof events. They may anticipate own failure in solving an important task, perceivea lack of own freedom in important decisions, or may just realize that their fate isdetermined by others, chance, or nature rather than by their own actions and deci-sions. Thus, the most straightforward way to reduce the malicious consequencesof threat on social conflict is to reduce these experiences in people and to fostera sense of empowerment, freedom, and control. This might be possible by eitherremoving objective restrictions on people’s control or inducing people to thinkdifferently about existing restrictions.

Removing objective threats to people’s control is not only desirable for avoid-ing ethnocentrism, but it should increase people’s overall well-being and health(Rodin & Langer, 1977). Of course, reducing barriers to control is often not easyand sometimes impossible. For example, there are certain realities in life, such asunavoidable death or insufficient control over relationship maintenance that onecannot change generally. In addition, societies cannot easily avoid certain crises(e.g., terrorist threat). However, changes in the conditions of people’s everydaylife that may easily be brought about by social institutions can sometimes lead tosignificant changes in perceived personal control. For example, Rodin and Langer(1977) demonstrated the tremendous impact even small changes in the rules ofeveryday life can have. Allowing inhabitants of an old people’s home in everydaysettings to determine the way in which things were done and assigning responsi-bilities to them (e.g., caring for a personal plant), increased their sense of control,well-being, and health (death rate dropped from 30% to 15%). This is a way inwhich social institutions such as schools or work organizations may contributeto perceptions of control in everyday life. It is also desirable to increase people’ssense of influence over the boundary conditions of their lives, which are negoti-ated on a societal and political level. Perceived lack of control in the political andeconomic sphere proved to be an important predictor of ethnocentrism (Agroskin& Jonas, 2010; Mansel et al., 2006; see above). Thus, increasing democracy andpeople’s participation in political processes may indirectly contribute to reducingethnocentrism and intolerance.

Inducing people to think differently about possible threats (secondary con-trol; Rothbaum et al., 1982; Skinner, 2007) might be an alternative way to increaseperceptions of control in everyday life. This does not necessarily mean to nour-ish illusions of control in areas where control is absent. Instead, people may beencouraged to focus on aspects in their lives over which they have control. Thismight be particularly valuable in situations where total control is not feasible.This is plausible: Fritsche et al. (2008) showed that reflecting on the possibilityof self-determined death (e.g., suicide) reduced ethnocentric tendencies comparedto thinking about uncontrollable death. Similar findings come for the threat of


relationship loss or unemployment threat where reminding people of the possi-bility that they end a relation by themselves or that they quit their job reducedethnocentric responses (see also Fritsche et al., 2009, 2011).

Increasing objective and subjective control on the personal level are twopossible ways of increasing people’s sense of control in everyday life. However,systematic interventions are sometimes hard to implement and humans’ controlis ultimately restricted. From the perspective of group-based control restoration,increasing people’s sense of belonging to cohesive and agentic in-groups might bean alternative avenue for reestablishing a sense of control. The results by Fritscheet al. (2011a) suggest that perceiving the in-group as homogeneous and agenticis in fact comforting. Inducing participants to think about a homogeneous andagentic in-group led to low levels of ethnocentric responses to personal threatcompared to in-groups lacking homogeneity and agency.

For possible interventions to reduce the detrimental effects of control threaton ethnocentric reactions, this means that it should be beneficial to promote socialenvironments that allow people to affiliate with social groups. The more thesegroups are perceived as cohesive and agentic, the better they may protect from theadverse consequences of threatened personal control. Examples for such groupsare formal or informal groups that pursue a common goal, such as sports teams orpolitical action groups, or that share interests and values, such as hobby groups orbounded friendship circles. However, also on the level of highly inclusive socialcategories, such as nations or preference groups, perceived collective cohesivenessand agency may be comforting as it may help people to cope with threats to personalcontrol.

Of course, strong group affiliation and the preference for in-group cohesionunder conditions of threat also have a negative side. They may instigate negativegroup processes, such as in-group bias, intragroup aggression against deviants,and discrimination of out-groups. To reduce these dark sides of belonging andgroup identification, it is important that group norms promote valuing diversityand nonviolent forms of conflict resolution. We will discuss the role of positivegroup norms in the following section.

Riding the Tiger: The Salience of ProSocial Norms

Humans’ control over their lives will always fall behind their prospects aspersonal control is ultimately restricted. This is why people will always need tocope with threats to their global sense of control. Emphasizing the membershipin social groups is one important way to cope with threat (Fritsche et al., 2008;Stroebe & Stroebe, 1996). Therefore, it is worthwhile to understand whethergroup-based responses to personal threat that do not trigger hostile intergroupbehavior are possible and may even promote tolerance and peace.


Fig. 3. Out-group derogation (negative evaluations) of the French by English participants as a functionof mortality salience and self-categorization as English or European (based on data from Giannakakis& Fritsche, 2011, study 2).

Common in-groups and mutual acceptance. Accepting the fact that mem-bership in social in-groups becomes more important under threat one strategyto prevent phenomena of intergroup hostility is to change the representation ofwho the in-group is. Gaertner and Dovidio (2000) and Gaertner, Mann, Murrell,and Dovidio (1989) suggested that recategorizing the in-group and the out-groupon the level of a common in-group might eliminate prejudice against the formerout-group. For example, prejudice between people of different nations such asthe British and the French, might be resolved by thinking of them as Europeans.In fact, Giannakakis and Fritsche (2011) showed for English participants thatthis kind of recategorization prevented (uncontrolled) mortality salience from in-creasing the derogation of the French out-group and even reversed its commoneffect. For those participants who thought about similarities among the English,mortality salience increased the negative evaluation of the French. However, mor-tality salience decreased out-group derogation when participants thought aboutcommonalities among Europeans (see Figure 3).

Obviously, cognitively merging in-group and out-group to a common in-groupleads threat to improve reactions toward members of the (former) out-group. How-ever, what is critical about the common in-group identity model is that althoughrecategorization might improve attitudes toward people within the new commoncategory (e.g., Europeans) it may at the same time increase prejudice toward thosewho are outside the common in-group (e.g., Americans; Kessler & Mummendey,


2001; Kessler, Noack, & Gniewosz, 2010). At the same time, people might be re-luctant to dismiss important identities in everyday life (e.g., giving up the Englishin favor of a European identity). This is why Brown and Hewstone (2005) proposedmutual distinctiveness between groups as an alternative strategy. According to thismodel, people retain group membership but comparisons between in-group andout-group take place on various dimensions that represent the mutual strengthsof both groups. For instance, whereas the West Germans may acknowledge EastGermans’ merits in running a peaceful revolution, East Germans may value WestGermans’ past economic success.

The understanding of who the in-group is and of how in-group and out-groupare related determines whether ethnocentric tendencies under conditions of threatlead to negative reactions toward out-groups. However, establishing conditions ofcommon in-group identity or mutual distinctiveness is not easy (but see Pettigrew,1998) and often, basic psychological mechanisms, such as the inclination to affirmpositivity of the in-group by differentiation from out-groups (Tajfel & Turner,1979) hamper such endeavors. For the reduction of intergroup bias, more recentresearch suggests that perceiving superordinate groups as diverse and complexreduces in-group favoritism in intergroup comparisons (Waldzus, Mummendey,Wenzel, & Weber, 2003). Perhaps, social norms of recognizing and appreciatingdiversity can pave the way to a tolerant society, even under conditions of threat.However, where do such social norms come from? They are themselves a productof group life. Promoting in-group norms that foster intergroup tolerance andpeaceful conflict resolution may reduce the adverse consequences of threat in therealm of intergroup relations.

Group norms that promote peaceful interaction. Group-based control meansthat under personal threat people tend to define their self as a group memberand the “we” replaces the “I.” This increases people’s tendency to think and act interms of group membership. This is the core meaning of ethnocentrism. Of course,the normative content of group membership, the way typical group members areexpected to think and to act, varies from group to group and sometimes alsoacross situations. For example, there might be different understandings of howto treat foreigners in a group of right-wing nationalists than in a human rightsaction group. At the same time, it may vary from situation to situation what itsubjectively means to be a “good” American. When thinking about the “conflictbetween the Western and the Muslim world,” people may reject the plans to builda mosque close to ground zero, which might be conceived of as an obligation forevery citizen. However, remembering the liberal foundations of the U.S. Americanconstitution may lead people to believe that it is every American’s duty to acceptthe mosque.

Recent research demonstrates that the perception of what the dominantcultural norms are in a particular situation is highly malleable. Moreover,


manipulations of which norm is salient in a situation can change the directionof threat effects on people’s behavior. Jonas et al. (2008) demonstrated in a set ofstudies that inducing people to think of their death without providing any remindersof control increased their compliance to salient social norms. For example, mor-tality salience increased people’s willingness to support a charitable organizationwhen they were subtly reminded of the concepts of benevolence and universalism.Instead, when participants had been reminded of power striving and hedonism,mortality salience reduced their inclination to help. In a similar vein, Jonas et al.(2008) manipulated both the salience of death and the salience of pacifism relatedthoughts in German participants. Then, after participants had been told that theremight be considerable danger to their country due to the development of nuclearweapons in Iran, they were asked to rate a number of conflict resolution strategies.Whereas mortality salience decreased their approval of peaceful conflict resolu-tion in a neutral condition, it increased their interest in peace promoting measureswhen thoughts about pacifism were salient. Similar results demonstrating thatnorm content moderates mortality salience effects emerged in various other stud-ies (Jonas et al., 2008; Jonas & Fritsche, in press; Gailliot, Stillman, Schmeichel,Maner, & Plant, 2008).

For the solution of intergroup conflicts, in-group norms of peaceful conflictresolution play a decisive role. The studies by Jonas et al. (2008) provide a firstindication that group norms may prevent personal threat to increase people’s readi-ness for fierce intergroup conflict. Moreover, in-group norms may even reversethe effects of threat, reducing negative behavior toward out-groups. This is indi-cated by results by Giannakakis and Fritsche (2011, study 3) who manipulatedgroup norms in a more straightforward fashion. After a manipulation of mortal-ity salience students of the University of Plymouth, United Kingdom, receivedbogus survey results either indicating that individualistic or that collectivisticvalues would be predominant among University of Plymouth students. Whereasthe former values imply the support of the in-group, the latter would suggestthat everyone fights for herself/himself as a single individual regardless of groupmembership. Mortality salience induced participants to favor their in-group inresource allocation decisions when the collectivism norm was salient, but led toless in-group favoritism when they believed that individualism was the in-groupnorm.

These results indicate that processes of group-based control might be possiblethat do not lead to in-group bias or ethnocentric thinking. Obviously, the desireto conform to in-group norms under conditions of threat is so strong that it caneven eliminate basic in-group bias, which seems sometimes as the indispensablebasis of social identity as a group member (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). This shouldencourage social and political interventions that target changing social norms ofintergroup interaction. Such interventions should pay off particularly in times ofsocietal and personal threat.


Threat and Collective Action against Social Crises

Valuing diversity and promoting in-group norms of peaceful conflict res-olution may help to reduce malicious consequences of ethnocentric responsesto personal threat. However, the interplay of “prosocial” norms and threat mayalso have positive effects on the broader society by enabling productive inter-group conflict and social change. We have discussed intergroup conflict almostexclusively as a bad thing, yet. However, under certain conditions, it may be nec-essary for social innovation, such as abolishing unjust status inequalities betweengroups (e.g., racial or gender inequalities; Wright & Lubensky, 2009) or initiatingcollective action toward society-serving goals (e.g., through the environmentalprotection movement). Research on collective action (for recent reviews, see VanZomeren & Iyer, 2009; Van Zomeren, Postmes, & Spears, 2008) has shown thatidentification with social in-groups can foster collective goal pursuit and socialmovement participation (e.g., in the context of the gay rights movement). There-fore, in-group supporting reactions to threat should improve the position of therespective in-group by inducing in-group members to engage in collective ac-tion toward social change. As a secondary benefit, social movement participationmight strengthen the democratic culture of a country, thereby increasing people’sperceptions of global control in the political sphere. This may not only increasepeople’s well-being but—drawing on the research by Agroskin and Jonas (2010)and Mansel et al. (2006)—might also reduce general tendencies of intolerance andprejudice.

This sketches a case where group-based responses to personal threat mayhave repercussions for the societal conditions that determine threat. As we havediscussed in the section on complex societal threats, societal crises, such as eco-nomic crises, terrorism, or climate change, lay a fertile ground for both personaland collective threats to grow in a population. However, group-based responsesto threat might provide the conditions to act collectively against the source orthe consequences of societal crises. As we have seen, especially the combinationof personal and collective threat can induce people to fight for their group. Forexample, members of a human rights group increased their willingness to engagein proorganizational action, such as supporting future political campaigns, underconditions of personal and collective threat (Fritsche et al., 2011). Other resultsshowed people under personal threat to increase intended support of their preferredpolitical party (Fritsche et al., 2008).

Extending the research on the interactive impact of personal threat and in-group norms on people’s actions Fritsche, Jonas, Niesta Kayser, and Koranyi(2010) demonstrated that threat can—under certain conditions—foster individualaction that helps to reduce the environmental crisis. They found that mortalitysalience increased proenvironmental intentions (preference for fuel-saving cars,conservation decisions in a common goods dilemma game on forest management)


and behavior (using reusable instead of disposable cups) when people had beenreminded of social norms of environmentalism. Without being reminded of thesenorms no threat effect occurred. This stresses the importance of prosocial anduniversal in-group norms for fostering collective responses to threat that lead toprosocietal action and help to resolve societal crises.

However, despite these positive examples, trusting that threat-induced groupaction will automatically reduce societal crises is a risky business, as group actionmight be guided by the wrong premises of how to solve a crisis. Negotiating normswithin groups is a complex process, which is frequently determined more by socialinfluence (Hogg, 2010) than by “rational” decisions that minimize crisis. Theremight be disagreement within a group about how to deal effectively with globalclimate change (e.g., reducing private car use or denying the existence of climatechange). In other groups, there might be agreement on how to solve a crisis suchas terrorist threat but their measures even aggravate the situation (e.g., invadinga noninvolved state). In addition, at times, group-based responses to threat mightlead to totalitarianism and intergroup hatred ending in a collapse of humanity, asoccurred in 1930s in Germany. Interestingly, an analysis of the motivational under-pinnings of terrorism by Kruglanski and Fishman (2009) revealed a combinationof personal and collective threat increasing the likelihood of people becomingsuicide terrorists.

Consequently, it would overextend the interpretation of the previous findingsto recommend trusting in the self-healing feedback circle of threat and collectiveaction. Research has shown that the effects of personal threat on in-group supportand defense are largely unconscious and automatic mental processes. People usu-ally do not deliberately weigh up different possibilities of collective respondingto threat but instead they become more positively attuned to their own groups andtheir norms, whatever these norms are. Thus, groups are well advised to negotiatetheir norms and rules following universally ethical, rational, and democratic pro-cedures. Then, ethnocentric reactions to threat may fuel collective action that mayimprove both the in-group and larger society.

Conclusions and Future Directions

We have presented a social psychological perspective on the consequencesof personal and collective threat for group life and intergroup conflict. Specif-ically, we argued for a group-based control model that can explain heightenedethnocentric tendencies as a consequence of personal and collective threat. Wesuggest that to restore a subjective sense of global control, people under threatincrease their identification with in-groups, their conformity to in-group norms,and the tendency to support and defend the in-group. Doubts about whether thein-group has control restorative properties, such as cohesion and agency, might


elicit collective threat, which has been shown to further increase ethnocentric re-actions to personal control threat. Such conditions of double threat may be presentin societal crises and the control restoration approach helps to understand fierceethnocentric reactions under conditions of economic crises, terrorism, or climatechange threat. Finally, we have discussed possibilities of reducing the adverseforms of ethnocentrism as a consequence of threat, such as intergroup hostilityor prejudice. Increasing people’s global sense of control and changing the rele-vance and normative content of social in-groups might be two fruitful directions topursue.

The evidence we presented in this article illustrates both the breadth of threateffects on ethnocentric behavior and the validity of the control model. We triedto encompass a huge area of research and make clear how this—predominantlyexperimental work—might be used for understanding and changing social re-ality. This is why it was neither intended nor possible to provide a completecompendium of studies on personal threat and ethnocentric tendencies. However,as we started our search from recent related reviews on threat and intergroupbehavior (Branscombe et al., 1999; Correll & Park, 2005; Fritsche & Kessler,2010; Riek et al., 2006) we are confident that we did not overlook any influ-ential research that is inconsistent with the presented views. We also took careto assemble studies from different cultural backgrounds. However, most of theavailable studies stem from Middle and Western Europe and the United States.This raises the question of whether the present findings have intercultural validity.Although we think that the described phenomena reflect on general principlesof human mental and social functioning, future studies may replicate the ef-fects of threat to control on ethnocentric tendencies in different cultural contexts(e.g., for cross-cultural evidence for the effects of mortality salience, see Burkeet al., 2010).

In this article, we have uncovered subtle processes of how people’s mindsrespond to threat and the consequences this has for social cognition, behavior,and intergroup conflict. We have suggested implications for understanding andreducing ethnocentric tendencies in times of societal crises. This adds a missingpiece to the discussion of why societal crises breed ethnocentrism and intergroupconflict. It goes beyond a merely sociostructural perspective. For instance, in-vestigations of the psychological consequences of climate change for peace andconflict are only emerging yet on the level of sociostructural change, such asincreased migration or scarcity of basic natural resources. Although social geo-graphic research demonstrated that these conditions can indeed result in intensesocial conflict (Burke et al., 2009), it needs a psychological theory of why andwhen social conflict grows out of societal crises. This is necessary for being ableto estimate properly the societal impact of crises, such as climate change and fordesigning and evaluating interventions to preserve peace and conflict in times ofthreat.


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IMMO FRITSCHE is a Professor of Social Psychology at the University ofLeipzig, Germany. In 2002 he received his PhD in Social- and EnvironmentalPsychology at the University of Magdeburg, Germany, and in 2009 his habilita-tion at the University of Jena. His primary interests in research and teaching arein the fields of group processes, motivated social cognition, and the psychologyof the global environmental crisis.

EVA JONAS is a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Salzburg,Austria, Department of Psychology. She received both her PhD in Social Psychol-ogy in 2000 and her habilitation in 2004 at the University of Munich, Germany.In her research she is focusing on social motivation, motivated social cognition,social interaction, and economic psychology.

THOMAS KESSLER is a Professor of Social Psychology at the Friedrich-Schiller-University, Jena, Germany. He received his PhD in Psychology at the University ofOsnabruck, Germany, and his habilitation in Psychology at the University of Jena.He was professor for social psychology at the University of Exeter from 2007 to2010. He teaches various courses in social psychology and methods of psychologyincluding discrimination and tolerance between social groups, authoritarianism,group behavior, acculturation, and other topics at an undergraduate and graduatelevel. His research interest centers around group and identity formation, socialdiscrimination and prejudice, tolerance and recognition, as well as evolutionaryapproaches to intergroup behavior.

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Collective Reactions to Threat: Implications for Intergroup Conflict and for Solving Societal Crises