Research has shown that when people encounter other individuals, they can rapidly and efficiently keep track of information such as the sex, age, or coalition of those individuals. An outstanding question in the field is what kind of information individuals draw on to keep track of coalitions. Some theories of our coalitional psychology suggest that the essential ingredient for coalitions is the presence of cooperative and competitive goals - e.g. political parties that are competing for roles in government, basketball teams that are competing for points, etc. This leads to the prediction that merely perceiving that groups of individuals have competing goals will lead to categorization of those individuals in terms of coalitions even if the goals are restricted to a short-lived situation - i.e., the groups are situational. In three studies, the preponderance of the evidence indicates that situational goals are not enough to elicit coalitional categorization. This suggests that our psychology of coalitions may rely on more than just the patterns of competition and cooperation between those around us.
Read
