Navigating the social world requires individuals to balance multiple goals, including the drives to improve one's own outcomes, aid ingroup members, and help or hurt outgroup members. While self-interest and intergroup bias are both well-established motivational phenomena, less is known about how these goals may interact. Here we examine the nature of goal tradeoffs in intergroup decision-making using a novel task in which participants simultaneously make monetary decisions for themselves, an arbitrary ingroup, and the corresponding outgroup. Across four behavioural studies and one eye-tracking study (total = 704), we find that goals in intergroup contexts are pursued sequentially rather than concurrently, with non-linear upweighting of group-related goals when self-related goals cannot be pursued. Further, we find evidence for stronger self-ingroup than self-outgroup tradeoffs, which manifest in both altered attention to information and altered use of the attended information in decision-making. The results shed light on the cognitive structuring of interrelated goals in intergroup decision-making, furthering our understanding of when and how both intergroup biases and prosocial behaviour may emerge.

中文翻译：

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如果不是我，那么我们：自我、内群体和外群体决策的目标权衡


在社交世界中航行需要个人平衡多个目标，包括改善自身成果、帮助内群体成员以及帮助或伤害外群体成员的动力。虽然自利和群体间偏见都是公认的动机现象，但人们对这些目标如何相互作用却知之甚少。在这里，我们使用一项新颖的任务来研究群体间决策中目标权衡的本质，在该任务中，参与者同时为自己、任意内群体和相应的外群体做出货币决策。在四项行为研究和一项眼球追踪研究（总计 = 704）中，我们发现群体间的目标是按顺序而不是同时追求的，当无法追求自我相关目标时，群体相关目标的权重会非线性增加。此外，我们发现证据表明自我内群体比自我外群体权衡更强，这体现在对信息的注意力的改变和决策中对所关注信息的使用的改变。研究结果揭示了群体间决策中相互关联目标的认知结构，进一步加深了我们对群体间偏见和亲社会行为何时以及如何出现的理解。