Models of ethnic violence have primarily been descriptive in nature, advancing broad or particular social and political reasons as explanations, and neglecting the contributions of individuals as decision-makers. Game theoretic and rational choice models recognize the role of individual decision-making in ethnic violence. However, such models embrace a classical economic theory view of unbounded rationality as utility-maximization, with its exacting assumption of full informational access, rather than a model of bounded rationality, modeling individuals as satisficing agents endowed with evolved domain-specific competences. A newer theoretical framework hypothesizing the existence of a human coalitional psychology, an evolved domain of competence, allows us to make sense of core features of memorial narratives about ethnic violence. Qualitative data from the interviews of fifty-seven participants who were impacted by the Croatian Homeland War support expectations entailed by a coalitional psychology model of ethnic strife.

种族暴力的模式本质上主要是描述性的，它们提出了广泛或特定的社会和政治原因作为解释，而忽视了个人作为决策者的贡献。博弈论和理性选择模型认识到个人决策在种族暴力中的作用。但是，这些模型将古典经济学理论中的无限制理性视为效用最大化，并严格假设其具有完全的信息访问权，而不是有限制理性的模型，而是将个人建模为具有特定领域能力的令人满意的主体。一个新的理论框架假设人类联盟心理的存在，这是能力的发展领域，它使我们能够理解有关民族暴力的纪念性叙述的核心特征。