ArticleNature human behaviour2021
Cognitive and neural bases of decision-making causing civilian casualties during intergroup conflict.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 13 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neurocomputational Mechanisms Linking Future Interaction Prospects to Reactive and Proactive Costly Punishment.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- Neural Tracking of Race-Related Information During Face Perception.Neuroscience bulletin · 2025Article
- The paradoxical brain: paradoxes impact conflict perspectives through increased neural alignment.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- The social transmission of empathy relies on observational reinforcement learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Neural representation of perceived race mediates the opposite relationship between subcomponents of self-construals and racial outgroup punishment.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Civilian casualties occur during military attacks. Such 'collateral damage' is prohibited by international laws but increases with substantial consequences when intergroup conflict escalates. Here, we investigate cognitive and neural bases of decision-making processes resulting in civilian harm, using a task that simulates punishment decision-making during intergroup conflict. We test two groups of Chinese participants in a laboratory setting, and members of two ethnic groups (Jewish and Palestinian) in Israel. The results dissociate two psychological constructs, harm preference and harm avoidance, which respectively characterize punishment decision-making related to outgroup combatants and outgroup noncombatants during intergroup conflict. In particular, individuals show decreased avoidance of harming outgroup noncombatants when conflict escalates. Brain imaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging) reveals that decreased harm avoidance is predicted by inhibition of the left middle frontal activity during selection of punishment decisions. Our findings provide insight into the cognitive and neural bases of decision-making involving civilian harm during intergroup conflict.
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