A Threat to Cohesion: Intragroup Affective Polarization in the Context of Intractable Intergroup Conflict

Abstract

Growing affective polarization, or animosity between competing ideological groups, threatens to tear apart democratic societies worldwide. In nations that are facing external conflicts, the threat arising from these conflicts may boost internal cohesion and potentially reduce the internal threat of fragmentation. However, in the current study, we analyze survey datasets from two societies embedded in intractable conflicts, South Korea ( N = 897) and Israel ( N = 504), and demonstrate that gaps in the perception of the external threat between competing ideological groups are related to higher levels of affective polarization within these societies. We also find support for a mechanism that explains this trend: an internal threat from the ideological outgroup. We discuss the implications of our findings for the study of conflicts' impact on intragroup processes, specifically affective polarization, and for the understanding of how such processes might perpetuate the conflict itself.