The experimental setup: a breakfast table, fruit juice, two glasses. The subjects: two children of kindergarten age. If you fill the two glasses a little differently, the result will not be long in coming. Presumably a child will protest loudly why his sibling is getting more. Unfair, mean! Refilling in turn gets the other side going, which in turn sees itself being taken advantage of. Welcome to the spiral of escalation.
A scientific explanation for this behavior is the “relative deprivation”. According to this theory, people feel deprived when they feel they are getting less than they are entitled to – even if objectively they do not suffer from a deficiency. The manifestations go far beyond childish outbursts of anger. The disadvantage of social groups is also associated with riots and violent riots, for example when young people broke windows in London in 2011 and looted shops. However, evidence of a connection between disadvantage and violence is scarce, and the thesis is consequently controversial. Therefore, psychologists have now examined the whole thing with the help of a computer game.
Researchers led by Guillaume Dezecache from University College London have programmed an app for the experiment in which two teams compete to design a garden. When the members of a group work together, flowers, trees or park benches appear on the screen. You can also see how the opposing garden is thriving next door. But the game also has a destructive side. In this way, a group can flatten the flowers of its neighbors and devastate their garden.
In many rounds, the psychologists deliberately discriminated against one side. This had to work twice as hard for a new plant to grow. The researchers hadn’t told the players about the intervention. They only saw how the garden of their opponents grew much faster – and with it their own frustration. The result: Disadvantaged groups pressed the destroy button significantly more often than under the same conditions, the researchers report in the specialist journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B..
Of course, flipping a switch in a virtual game or joining a real-world riot isn’t the same. However, the researchers see evidence that similar psychological mechanisms are at work in both cases. “When the frustration increases, there comes a point at which you stop being constructive,” says Dezecache. “Aggression releases this frustration.” In surveys, the participants stated that the comparison with their opponents was often decisive for the orgy of destruction, according to the motto: Why are they already so far, if we didn’t deserve it?
In contrast, Dezecache describes the thesis often advocated by politicians that violent groups consist of aggressive people as insufficient. Finally, in the experiment, any team randomly thrown together let themselves be carried away to riot, provided they were disadvantaged.