ABSTRACT
Chapter 10 examines the problem of aggression and violence between social groups. Intergroup aggression and collective violence refer to a range of different forms of aggressive behaviour carried out by groups of individuals whose behaviour is shaped by the fact that they feel, think, or act as part of a group. The chapter starts by discussing two influential social psychological explanations of intergroup conflict, the theory of realistic group conflict and social identity theory. The next section is devoted to research on gang violence, much of which is directed against rival gangs and therefore qualifies as intergroup aggression. Hate crimes are a form of intergroup aggression in which victims are targeted because of specific characteristics, such as their ethnic, racial, or religious group membership, or their sexual orientation. Crowd violence and rioting are forms of collective violence that occur in specific contexts in transient social groups. Whereas earlier research on deindividuation explained aggressive crowd behaviour as the result of a breakdown of self-regulation and normative control, subsequent explanations stressed a shift from individual norms to group norms.
