Family matters: Living near relatives makes us heroic and harsh

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Many of us will soak in the merriment and drama that family gatherings bring during Thanksgiving. But beyond the Thanksgiving dinner table, new research suggests that living and being around family more often affects our psychology in some surprising ways.

The work is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Are you willing to go to war for your country? Do you support the death penalty? Do you feel connected to and trust people in your community? The answers to these questions are all connected to whether you live around family, say researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Irvine.

They analyzed six studies about how living in an environment with many or few relatives psychologically impacted participants in the United States, the Philippines and Ghana.

"These effects arise because living in areas with lots of relatives, or just feeling like lots of relatives are around, shifts the importance people place on supporting others (and ensuring they are not hurt)," said Joshua Ackerman, U-M professor of psychology.

People and populations that live in ecologies with more family relatives, or who imagine themselves to be living in such ecologies, engage in more extreme pro-group behavior, such as being willing to go to war for their country, he says.

People also feel more connected to others around them and are more punishing of antisocial behaviors—such as supporting the death penalty for murder. For the latter, according to Ackerman, this serves as a prevention measure to reduce the risk of harm to family members or to punish those who harm one's family.

Living around relatives carries both benefits and problems, says lead author Oliver Sng, UC-Irvine assistant professor of psychological science.

"You naturally feel more connected to those around you, as many of them are family of some sort," he said. "But this also means that there are more people around you that you need to protect. That's why we see people living around relatives supporting punishment of dangerous behaviors."

Sng says the research highlights the psychological effects of an underexamined dimension of our social ecology—relatedness. It also holds implications for understanding the ecological origins of a range of social behaviors and cultural differences, he says.

More information: Oliver Sng et al, The ecology of relatedness: How living around family (or not) matters., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2024). DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000428

Journal information: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Provided by University of Michigan