Preemptive Strikes or not: The Role of Emotion on Intergroup Defensive Aggression

This study aimed to examine intergroup preemptive behaviors and the emotional mechanism through 3 experiments. Experiment 1 designed the Group Preemptive Strike Game and found that in intergroup situations, individuals experienced intense fear and hope when they faced the potential threat from gaming counterparts, but their preemptive behaviors were not altered. Both Experiments 2 and 3, which were designed to simulate real-life groups with characteristics such as punishment (Experiment 2) and leadership (Experiment 3), found that people experienced intense fear and hope when they faced the potential threat and tended to attack preemptively. Fear and hope were mediators between the potential threat and preemptive behaviors, in which fear increased the preemptive behaviors of members, and hope decreased the preemptive behaviors.

The dataset was collected among Chinese university students and used to study preemptive behaviors by Z-tree (Fischbacher, 2007). There are 5 sub-tables in Excel; Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 each contain 2 sub-tables.