The psychology of offensive and defensive intergroup violence: Preregistered insights from 58 countries
In a preregistered study spanning 58 countries, support for offensive and defensive intergroup violence turned out to rest on different psychological foundations — there is no single 'propensity for violence' for policy to target.
The paper, in plain language
Testing an assumption the field had skipped
Prevention policy has largely been built as though people carry one dial for violence, turned higher or lower. With collaborators on every continent, we preregistered a direct test: do support for striking first and support for striking back share a psychology? Fielding the same materials in 58 countries also let us check whether any answer holds beyond the Western samples that dominate the literature.
What we found
The two do not collapse into one. Offensive and defensive violence drew on distinguishable motivational profiles, and the distinction replicated across cultural contexts. People who endorse defending their group against attack are not simply milder versions of those who endorse attacking first — they are, psychologically, doing something different.
Why it matters
An intervention aimed at 'violent tendencies' in general is aimed at nothing in particular. Separating the psychologies of offense and defense gives prevention two distinct targets — and helps explain why groups so often experience their own violence as defensive while outsiders code it as aggression. A reply to commentary on the paper, also in PNAS, extends the argument about what laboratory games can and cannot capture of this.
Kunst, J. R., Besta, T., Jaśkiewicz, M., Gajda, A. N., Sanden, M., Flatebø, M. M., Adebayo, S. O., Adonis, M., Agyemang, C. B., Boateng, R. A., Akfirat, S. A., Al-adawi, S., Ambrosio, C., Anjum, G., Aruta, J. J. B. R., Austers, I., Barry, O., Bastian, B., Becker, M.,…Obaidi, M. (2026). The psychology of offensive and defensive intergroup violence: Preregistered insights from 58 countries. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123(13), e2535665123. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2535665123