Aggressive interactions and social discrimination: The impact of perspective-specific and context-specific legitimisation

Theories and experiments about aggressive behaviour, on the one hand, and t heories and experiments about social discrimination, on the other hand, are rarely associated with each other. Based upon a summary of more recent wor k in both domains, the article lines out that a consideration of parallels between the two phenomena could be fruitful. While perspective- and context -specific interpretation is an integral part of many recent concepts about aggression, there is still no comparable analysis concerning ingroup favour itism and outgroup derogation. Based on a critical discussion of research o n the "mere categorisation effect" it is argued that theories of intergroup behaviour should similarly take into account that unequal treatment of gro ups is based on subjective interpretation and legitimisation.