Social contact interventions have been shown to reduce prejudice and stereotyping, but optimal contact conditions between groups are often out of reach in day to day life. Stereotyping is a pervasive societal problem that impacts not only minority groups but subserves individuals who perpetuate stereotypes, leading to greater distance between groups. The results suggest (1) that the transition to a settled lifestyle in the Neolithic may have been more challenging than is usually assumed and (2) that the increases in settlement size that followed the first villages necessitated the introduction of a series of social institutions designed to manage within-community discord. This glass ceiling correlates with the adoption of social institutions that allow tensions to be managed. This is not, however, the case for cultivators living in permanent settlements, where there appears to be a ‘glass ceiling’ below which homicide rates oscillate. Humans live in very large groups by mammal standards, so how have they solved this problem? I use homicide rates as an index of within-community stress for humans living in small-scale ethnographic societies, and show that the frequency of homicide increases linearly with living-group size in hunter-gatherers. Group-living is stressful for all mammals, and these stresses limit the size of their social groups. Implications and future directions are discussed. Imagining walking in synchrony fostered greater increases in empathy and decreases in negative attitudes only towards minority group members following imagined coordination (not in-groups). The current study explored whether imagining walking in synchrony with in- or out-group members changed majority members’ attitudes towards those individuals. Previous work has shown that the pro-social effects of coordination may be linked to whether co-actors are classed as in or out-group members. There are also non-verbal embodied intergroup activities that produce the same effects. Common contact interventions have members of different groups meet and engage in conversation. One method of improving intergroup relations is to create opportunities for contact. This can be particularly detrimental to minorities who may experience social exclusion, prejudice, and reduced access to equal opportunities. People are prone to dividing others into the categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’. These results indicate that group singing can increase closeness to less familiar individuals regardless of whether they share a common motivation, but that singing competitively may reduce closeness within a very tight-knit group. In contrast, participants reported reduced closeness with other teams from their own Clique after competing with them. Participants (N = 88) felt significantly closer to teams from different Cliques after singing with them compared to before, regardless of whether they cooperated with (singing loudly together) or competed against (trying to singing louder than) the other team. Participants were assigned to teams of four and were asked to sing together with another team either from the same Clique or from a different Clique. Both situations were recreated experimentally in order to explore how competitive and cooperative singing affects feelings of closeness towards others. Singing occurs frequently in this Fraternity, both “competitively” (contests between Cliques) and “cooperatively” (multiple Cliques singing together). Here we examine the social bonding outcomes of naturalistic singing behaviour in a European university Fraternity composed of exclusive “Cliques”: recognised sub-groups of 5–20 friends who adopt a special name and identity. Singing together seems to facilitate social bonding, but it is unclear whether this is true in all contexts.
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