ABSTRACT
Social psychologists have been very interested in the milder forms of inter-group conflict, such as people liking other groups less than they like their own, and holding negative beliefs about them. And psychologists have of course studied these mild forms of conflict in a scaled-down way, when subjects express small degrees of favouritism to imaginary groups which they are told they belong to. Meanwhile the world is being torn apart by real conflicts, where people hate and kill one another on an enormous scale. It may be between communist and capitalist nations, Israelis and Arabs, blacks and whites in Africa, and in numerous ‘civil’ wars. Although psychology’s contribution to these matters has so far been meagre, I feel that we should at any rate confront the issues.
