"People who identify strongly with their s frequently experience pleasure when they observe threatening members’ misfortunes: a phenomenon termed intergroup Schadenfreude. Though people are generally averse to harming others, they may learn to overcome this aversion via the consistent pairing of subjective pleasure with out-group pain, thereby lowering the barrier to participating in collective violence. In studies, intergroup Schadenfreude is associated with engagement of (VS), a brain region involved in . In these experiments, VS activity predicts increased harm and decreased help toward competitive out-group members. Experiencing this pleasure-pain association in intergroup contexts is particularly pernicious because it can generalize to people who are merely affiliated with a threatening out-group, but have done nothing to provoke harm."