Emotional reactions to harmful intergroup behavior

Abstract

In this paper, we examined reactions to situations in which, although one is not personally involved, one could see oneself connected to either the perpetrators or the victims of unfair behavior. We manipulated participants' similarity and measured their identification to either one of two groups which participants later learned was the victim or the perpetrator of harmful behavior. As predicted, making salient similarities to the victims lead participants to: 1) appraise the perpetrator's behavior as more unfair; 2) experience more anger; and 3) be more likely to take action against it and less prone to show support for it as a function of their level of identification with their salient ingroup. In sharp contrast, focusing participants' attention on their similarities to the perpetrators reversed this pattern of findings: Compared to high identifiers, low identifiers appraised the behavior as more unfair than high identifiers, which made them feel angry (and guilty) and less likely to show support for the perpetrator's behavior. The data also provide strong support for a mediational model in which appraisal of the situation colors the emotional reaction which in turn orients action tendencies. We discuss the implications of our findings for the issue of group-based emotions.

The social psychology of protest

“…The main postulate of intergroup emotion theory is that when a social identity is salient, situations are appraised in terms of their consequences for the in-group, eliciting specific intergroup emotions and behavioural intentions. Thus people experience emotions on behalf of their group when the social category is salient and they identify with the group at stake (Devos et al, 2002;Gordijn et al, 2006). Klandermans, 2007).…”

Bodily moral disgust: What it is, how it is different from anger, and why it is an unreasoned emotion.

“…Gordijn, Yzerbyt, Wigboldus, and Dumont (2006) have found that manipulating whether or not a participant could relate to the victim or perpetrator influenced their judgments, intensity of anger and subsequent behaviors, in reaction to a scenario that described a harmful behavior that one group inflicted on another group. Specifically, when persons were reminded of their similarities to the victims, this increased their judgments of unfairness, increased their anger and made it more likely that they would take action toward the perpetrator.…”

“It was only harmless banter!” The development and preliminary validation of the moral disengagement in sexual harassment scale

“…These negative emotions arise when people appraise in-group members as responsible for committing a salient illegitimate action (Shepherd, Spears, & Manstead, 2013a, 2013b. In-group directed anger, in particular, is an "other focused" emotion that is experienced when people attend to the victims of negative in-group behavior (e.g., Gordijn, Yzerbyt, Wigboldus, & Dumont, 2006;Iyer, Leach, & Crosby, 2003;Iyer, Schmader, & Lickel, 2007). Similarly, sympathy is an "other-focused" emotion that is felt when people focus on the victim's plight (Iyer et al, 2003).…”

“…These emotion items were adapted from Gordijn et al (2006) and were interspersed with three filler negative emotions (disgust, fear, sadness) not of primary theoretical interest. A 7-point scale (1 = not at all, 7 = very much) accompanied all emotion items.…”