The Impact of Instrumental Group Relations on Response Monitoring of Aggressive Behavior

Abstract Aggressive behavior is any behavior in which one individual or group intentionally causes harm to another targeted individual or group. Aggressive behaviors such as school violence, doctor-patient conflicts, and violent crimes, which are increasing year by year, bringing serious economic burdens and strong negative impacts on individuals and the entire society. Performance monitoring is the core function of the human executive system, plays a key role in behavior correction and goal-directed behavior, and is the psychological basis for reducing and intervening aggressive behavior. Effective performance monitoring depends primarily on two factors: threat detection (threat sensitivity) and response inhibition. Instrumental group relationship refers to the relationship between individual resources and group identity and group interests in a resource-competitive society. Instrumental group relations are divided into group identity and intergroup prejudice. Aggressive behavior theories include group identity theory and intergroup bias theory. Instrumental group relationships may have a looser psychological perception threshold for threat and lead to decreased executive functioning. In this study, we designed two experiments to investigate this question. Experiment 1 used the flanker-go/no go task to examine the effect of group identification on performance monitoring of aggressive behavior; Experiment 2 also used the flanker-go/no go task to investigate the effect of intergroup prejudice on performance monitoring of aggressive behavior. The results show that (1) the higher the implicit group identity, the greater the threat sensitivity. The higher the implicit intergroup prejudice, the greater the threat sensitivity. (2) Individuals are more sensitive to aggressive threats than to symbolic threats than to realistic threats. (3) In response inhibition, the higher the implicit identification, the weaker the response inhibition; (4) The ability of response inhibition under aggressive threat is lower than that of symbolic threat and lower than that of realistic threat