The research team, led by Hejing Zhang and Yina Ma of Beijing Normal University, analyzed behavior from 528 participants engaged in a real-time offender-defender game. Participants were organized into six-person same-sex groups, with three-person offense teams attempting to extract resources from a three-person defense team. Over 24 rounds, each participant independently decided how many tokens to contribute to their group pool. The payoff structure was deliberately asymmetric: if the offensive group’s total contribution exceeded the defensive group’s total, the attackers retained their own uninvested tokens and equally shared the defenders’ remaining unspent tokens, while defenders earned zero for that round. If the defensive total matched or exceeded the offensive total, the attack failed and all participants retained only their own uninvested tokens. This design distilled offense and defense into their core strategic problems: acquiring resources under uncertainty versus protecting resources under threat.

To quantify the strategies participants used, the researchers computed two indices from the trial-by-trial contribution data. Behavioral variability, indexing strategic unpredictability, was defined as the intra-individual variance of contributions across the 24 rounds. Strategic tracking, indexing state estimation, was measured as the extent to which an individual’s contributions changed in response to the opponent group’s previous actions, calculated using a lagged regression model. The results revealed a robust complementary pattern: behavioral variability was positively associated with success in offensive roles (r = 0.361, p < 0.001) but negatively associated with success in defensive roles (r = -0.179, p = 0.003). In contrast, strategic tracking predicted higher success in defense (r = 0.277, p < 0.001) but was unrelated to success in offense.

The researchers went further, decomposing variability into its behavioral components to rule out a pure noise account. High variability was driven by a pulsed pattern: combining high non-zero contribution levels when engaging, interspersed with intermittent zero-contribution rounds. Both engagement intensity and zero-contribution rate were independently associated with offensive success. Zero-contribution rounds were systematically linked to lower defensive resistance, greater average spoils on successful offensive rounds, and greater resource-extraction efficiency. This pattern argues against random fluctuation and instead suggests a temporally pulsed mode of offensive engagement: larger active-round contributions were linked to successful attack, whereas intermittent disengagement was associated with lower defensive investment and more efficient resource capture when offense succeeded.

When the researchers examined whether these strategic optima aligned with sex-differentiated behavioral priors, a clear pattern emerged. Across roles, males showed significantly higher behavioral variability than females (20.580 versus 15.510; p < 0.001), and this effect remained significant after controlling for opponent average contribution. Decomposing the variability effect revealed that males showed higher non-zero contribution levels than females (9.686 versus 8.272; p < 0.001), and in covariate-adjusted sensitivity analyses, males also showed higher zero-contribution frequency. This suggests that the male strategy is characterized by pulsed, high-intensity engagement that generates unpredictability, rather than simple differences in effort.

Females, in contrast, exhibited a role-specific bias toward adaptive tracking. A significant sex-by-role interaction emerged for the tracking index (p < 0.001). In the defensive role, female defenders showed significantly stronger positive opponent-contingent tracking than male defenders (0.223 versus 0.120; p = 0.011). In the offensive role, female offenders showed more negative opponent-contingent coupling than male offenders (-0.200 versus -0.107; p = 0.021). This interaction remained significant after controlling for opponent average contribution. Thus, females showed stronger opponent-contingent adjustment than males in both roles, but this adjustment was expressed in opposite directions: positive tracking in defense and more negative coupling in offense.

These strategic biases translated into measurable performance asymmetries. Males outperformed females in offensive roles, achieving higher success rates (0.259 versus 0.189; p < 0.001) and making decisions closer to the theoretical optimum. In contrast, females outperformed males in defensive roles, achieving higher success rates (0.811 versus 0.741; p < 0.001) and earning substantially more (9.985 versus 8.485; p < 0.001). Crucially, process measures indicated that the female defensive advantage was underpinned by greater cognitive efficiency: female defenders not only made more rational decisions but also responded significantly faster than male defenders. These patterns remained robust in supplementary analyses controlling for the opponent behavioral environment.

The researchers also explored whether individual differences in salivary testosterone were related to these role-aligned behavioral patterns. In male offenders, higher log-transformed testosterone values were associated with greater behavioral variability both before and after the task, with post-task testosterone also covarying with offensive success. In female defenders but not female offenders, higher salivary testosterone values were associated with stronger strategic tracking. These findings are presented as preliminary associations within each sex rather than as tests of male-female differences in mean testosterone levels, and the authors caution that estimates from cotton-collected salivary immunoassays can depend on both the collection procedure and the analytical method, particularly at the lower testosterone concentrations typically observed in women. Replication using more precise serum-based measures will be needed to establish the robustness of these associations.

Why do the sexes diverge along these specific strategic lines? The authors interpret these patterns as average, role-congruent tendencies under the asymmetric demands of the task, rather than fixed sex-specific specializations. Males, who have historically faced higher variance in reproductive payoffs, appear to encode a high-volatility prior, enduring the costs of variable engagement to maximize the probability of high-stakes returns. Females, incurring higher costs of injury and parental investment, appear to encode a precision prior, prioritizing error minimization and sensitivity to social cues. This account also accommodates the possibility that female competition is active and strategic rather than passive: work on competitive gossip and informational competition emphasizes monitoring rivals, updating socially relevant information, and using such information to manage competitive threats. Such information-sensitive strategies may fit the defensive demands of the present task, where success depended on tracking opponent behavior and adjusting contributions accordingly.

Importantly, the data indicate that these sex-differentiated priors reflect functional competence rather than impulsivity. The male advantage in offense and the female advantage in defense were accompanied by higher decision rationality and greater economic efficiency, implying that the male tendency toward variability is a potentially functional tactic to capitalize on uncertainty, while the female tendency toward tracking reflects an efficient heuristic for threat management. The present data cannot determine whether these tendencies reflect evolved affordances, contemporary gendered socialization, prior competitive experience, or their interaction. A key question for future research is how these distinct priors interact in direct cross-sex competition: whether the high-variability offense of males overwhelms the tracking capacity of female defenders, or whether female vigilance effectively decodes and neutralizes that variability. The study nonetheless provides a compelling framework for understanding sex- and role-related variation in intergroup decision-making, revealing that human conflict relies on a dissociated strategy architecture in which unpredictability generation and opponent tracking serve as specialized tools for acquisition and protection.

Subject of Research: Behavioral science

Article Title: Offensive unpredictability and defensive tracking in intergroup conflict show sex-differentiated patterns

Article References: Zhang, H., Zhang, C., Widjaja, A., & Ma, Y. (2026). Offensive unpredictability and defensive tracking in intergroup conflict show sex-differentiated patterns. iScience, 29(11), Article 117887. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2026.117887

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: intergroup conflict, sex differences, unpredictability, strategic tracking, testosterone, game theory, evolutionary psychology, defense, offense, decision-making, Offensive, defensive

The review, led by Johanna Ray Vollhardt of Clark University together with Hu Young Jeong of the University of Virginia, Zsolt P. Szabó of Corvinus University Budapest and Eötvös Loránd University, and Khaled Elazab of Clark University, synthesizes decades of research from social psychology, clinical and counselling psychology, liberation psychology, and adjacent disciplines. Its central contribution is a unifying structure: an appraisal–coping framework that organizes the sprawling literature on collective victimization beliefs into the phases long used to understand individual stress — primary appraisal, secondary appraisal, coping efforts, and coping outcomes. By mapping group-level beliefs onto this sequence, the authors offer a technically precise way to predict when collective victimization produces destructive consequences and when it instead gives rise to constructive ones.

The framework begins with primary appraisal, the initial assessment of whether an event threatens the group or offers an opportunity. Applied collectively, this stage encompasses beliefs about the severity, intentionality, and temporal scope of harm. A community may appraise a massacre as an existential threat to its survival, as a historical injustice that demands redress, or as a completed chapter of the past. Each reading carries distinct emotional signatures. Appraisals of ongoing threat generate fear and collective angst — the dread that the group’s future vitality is in jeopardy — whereas appraisals of past injustice can fuel anger, humiliation, or a sense of moral obligation. Research on historical trauma among Indigenous peoples, on the siege mentality documented in intractable conflicts, and on conspiracy beliefs as adaptations to historical trauma all illustrate how primary appraisals shape the psychological terrain on which later responses unfold.

Secondary appraisal follows: the evaluation of what the group can do about the harm. Here the framework incorporates beliefs about collective power, agency, and efficacy. Groups that perceive themselves as powerless may retreat into defensive victimhood, emphasizing their suffering to claim moral standing they cannot secure through strength. Groups that perceive latent strength may convert victimization appraisals into challenge rather than threat, a shift that studies on historical collective trauma suggest can transform intergroup dynamics. The review highlights findings among Black Americans, Kurdish communities, and other groups whose beliefs about ingroup resilience and resistance — the conviction that ‘we have survived before and can resist again’ — operate as psychological resources rather than wounds. These secondary appraisals determine whether coping efforts take the form of avoidance, such as denial and defensive closure, or approach, such as justice-seeking, collective action, and outreach.

The third phase, coping efforts, is where the framework displays its greatest explanatory reach. The authors distinguish among a wide repertoire of strategies that victimized groups deploy, many of which were previously treated as isolated phenomena. Competitive victimhood — the struggle to establish that one’s own group suffered more than its adversary — emerges as an avoidance-oriented strategy that obstructs forgiveness and reconciliation, as demonstrated in studies of Israeli–Palestinian, Bosnian, and other post-conflict settings. By contrast, inclusive victim consciousness, the belief that one’s own suffering connects the group to other victimized groups rather than separating it from them, functions as an approach-oriented coping effort associated with support for refugees, willingness for intergroup contact, and peace activism. The review also integrates less-studied efforts such as acknowledgment-seeking, the pursuit of recognition from perpetrators and the international community, which experimental and survey research links to improved psychological well-being and greater readiness for compromise.

Critically, the framework treats these beliefs as multidimensional rather than binary. Earlier scholarship often contrasted a single ‘victim mentality’ with its absence, but the review draws on the authors’ own empirical work — including Q-methodology studies across five communities and surveys in Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Northern Ireland, the Korean diaspora, and elsewhere — showing that people simultaneously hold multiple, sometimes contradictory victimization beliefs. A person may believe their group’s suffering was unique and unmatched while also feeling bound to other victims of history. The same historical memory can underwrite exclusive nationalism in one context and cosmopolitan solidarity in another, depending on which appraisals and coping pathways are activated. This complexity, the authors argue, is precisely what one-dimensional models have missed.

The consequences, or coping outcomes, span both individual and societal levels. At the individual level, chronic threat appraisals and avoidance coping are associated with heightened anxiety, depressive symptoms, and intergenerational transmission of trauma, patterns documented among Holocaust survivors’ descendants, Indigenous adolescents, Ukrainian Holodomor families, and refugee populations. Yet the review also catalogues constructive outcomes: posttraumatic growth after collective violence, altruism born of suffering, and radical hope — a culturally grounded orientation toward a better future even in revolting times. At the societal level, the same belief structures predict support for hostile policies such as population transfer and preemptive strikes on one hand, and for forgiveness, reparations, and joint political decision-making on the other. Recent meta-analytic work on collective victimhood beliefs and conflict-related attitudes confirms that these associations are robust across contexts, though their direction depends on which specific beliefs are measured.

The appraisal–coping lens also clarifies why interventions succeed or fail. Programs that reduce competitive victimhood by recategorizing adversaries into a common victim identity, narratives that frame historical trauma inclusively, moral-exemplar interventions highlighting figures who responded to injustice with principled resistance, and reconciliation radio dramas that encourage historical perspective-taking all work, in this framework’s terms, by shifting primary or secondary appraisals and by modeling approach-oriented coping. Conversely, commemorative practices that reinforce exclusive victimhood — such as memorial days that heighten affective polarization — can entrench threat appraisals even while strengthening ingroup cohesion. The framework thus gives practitioners a diagnostic vocabulary: identify which appraisal is dominant, which coping effort is being rewarded, and which outcome the belief structure is likely to produce.

The authors are careful to note the framework’s boundaries and the research agenda it implies. Much of the evidence remains correlational, drawn from self-report surveys in a limited set of conflict regions, and the field still lacks longitudinal designs tracking how appraisals evolve as violence unfolds or subsides. The review also stresses that coping with collective victimization cannot be reduced to individual adaptation: liberation psychology and decolonial scholarship remind researchers that oppression is structural, and that ‘coping’ in an unjust context may legitimately mean resistance rather than adjustment. Future work, the authors suggest, should examine within-group variation — how gender, generation, class, and intersectional identities shape whose victimization beliefs prevail — and should test the framework’s phases experimentally.

What emerges is a picture both sobering and hopeful. Collective victimization is neither a destiny of endless retaliation nor a guaranteed springboard to solidarity; it is a psychological process whose direction depends on appraisals of threat and agency, on the coping efforts communities can imagine and afford, and on the social and political environments that reward some beliefs while silencing others. By providing a common architecture for a fragmented literature, the review equips researchers, policymakers, and peacebuilders to ask a sharper question than ‘does trauma breed violence?’ — namely, which beliefs about victimhood, under which conditions, lead groups to lash out, and which lead them to reach out.

Subject of Research: An appraisal–coping framework explaining how collective victimization beliefs shape destructive and constructive group responses to violence

Article Title: An appraisal–coping framework of collective victimization beliefs and their consequences

Article References: Vollhardt, J. R., Jeong, H. Y., Szabó, Z. P., & Elazab, K. (2026). An appraisal–coping framework of collective victimization beliefs and their consequences. Nature Reviews Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-026-00610-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44159-026-00610-w

Keywords: collective victimization, appraisal-coping framework, intergroup conflict, historical trauma, collective victimhood beliefs, reconciliation, inclusive victim consciousness, competitive victimhood, collective resilience, social psychology, peace psychology, Nature Reviews Psychology