Vicarious Retribution
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General
What is Vicarious Retribution?
Vicarious retribution occurs when a member of a group commits an act of aggression towards the members of an outgroup for an assault or provocation that had no personal consequences for him or her but which did harm a fellow ingroup member. Furthermore, retribution is often directed at outgroup members who themselves were not the direct causal agents in the original attack against the person’s ingroup. Thus, retribution is vicarious in that neither the agent of retaliation nor the target of retribution were directly involved in the original event that precipitated the intergroup conflict.
What are related concepts?
Vicarious Retribution is a type of displaced aggression which occurs when a member of one's ingroup is harmed mediated by the group based emotion of anger.
Personality
What personality measures moderate Vicarious Retribution?
Since vicarious retribution has been shown to be moderated by the level of identification one has with one's ingroup, personality variables which moderate ingroup identification (ie. social dominance orientation) should produce greater levels of retribution. As well, since vicarious retribution has been shown to be mediated by anger, personality variables such as trait aggression should moderate vicarious retribution.
Situations
What situations moderate Vicarious Retribution?
Situations which make ingroup/outgroup distinctions salient are more likely to lead to vicarious retribution. For example, a sporting event with fans of opposite teams creates a highly ingroup/outgroup salient situation while a group of people stuck in a traffic jam does not.
Situations where the intial provocation attacks an object or symbol of the group (ie. a leader or prominent landmark) are more likely to create a sense of anger (Branscombe, Ellemers, Spears, and Doosje, 1999) leading to vicarious retrubution.
Normative influences may exist in some situations which compel an expected standard of behavior (Cialdini, Reno, and Kallgren, 1990; Deutsch and Gerard, 1955) such that retaliation against the outgroup is expected.
Group power differences may lead to different amounts of vicarious retribution as some research by Mackie et al. (2000) indicates that groups with greater power in an intergroup conflict are likely to react with anger to the outgroup, whereas groups with less power may be more likely to react with fear.
Public context may be linked to vicarious retribution. Research indicates that the presence of an audience increases the salience of social identities and magnifies the humiliation associated with affronts (Tedeschi & Felson, 1994). This line of reasoning suggests that a public context should promote stronger retaliation because it poses a stronger threat to group pride (Berkowitz, 1993).
Affect
What affective states mediate/moderate Vicarious Retribution?
Anger has been shown to be the prime mediator of the link between a provocation and vicarious retribution (Stenstrom, Unpublished Manuscript).
Group Pride, as explained in Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, 1981), states that people derive a sense of self-worth from their identity as a member of a group. People who are highly identified are more likely to react negatively to threats to their group (Branscombe, Ellemers, Spears, and Doosje, 1999).
Group Empathy - Empathy has been defined as one’s ability to cognitively understand another's internal state (e.g. Hogan, 1969; Underwood & Moore, 1982) or experience an emotion similar to that felt by another person (e.g., Eisenberg & Miller, 1987; Stotland, 1969) or congruent with his or her welfare (e.g., Batson, et al., 1988; Mehrabian & Epstein, 1972). Although the conceptual distinctions between these different types of empathy are important for some research arenas, what is important for our model is that empathy is a vicarious reaction that occurs from witnessing another person’s distressed condition or emotional state. Thus, witnessing harm to fellow group members is likely to lead to sympathy for them as well as feelings of empathic anger and indignation (Davis, 1994). Another key assumption we make is that empathy will influence helping behavior toward ingroup members. This assumption is backed by substantial research demonstrating robust connections between empathy and helping (e.g., Aronfreed, 1970; Batson, 1991; Carlson & Miller, 1987; Dovidio, Allen, & Schroeder, 1990; Eisenberg & Miller, 1987; Staub, 1978). Our assertion is that one way of helping an injured ingroup member is to retaliate against the outgroup from whom the harm arose.
What affective states are caused by Vicarious Retribution?
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Cognition
What cognitions mediate/moderate Vicarious Retribution?
Event Categorization as an ingroup-outgroup encounter is necessary for vicarious retribution. In cases where group membership is highly salient, such as Israeli-Palestinian relations or interactions between fans of opposing teams at a sporting event, the event is far more likely to be framed in intergroup terms. Vicarious retribution does not occur in cases where a member of one's ingroup commits the harm or the victim is not a member of one's ingroup.
Act Construal or attribution is the process whereby people begin to determine the intentions of people involved in an act and the blame that each person deserves. Divergent Construal (Ross and Ward 1995) refers to the intergroup bias that causes people to construe events so as to show ingroup members in a favorable light and outgroup members in an unfavorable light. This divergent construal contributes to cycles of vicarious retribution.
Group Identification has been shown by Yzerbyt (2003) to be linked to an increase in anger and aggressive intention after members of an ingroup are harmed by an outgroup.
Group Entitativity of the outgroup is central to the process of how people are motivated to take action against another member of the outgroup other than the perpetrator. Inferences about collective blame due to encouraging or failing to prevent provocations are heightened in high entativity groups (Denson et al. 2006). Dispositional Inferences are also more easily made for a high entativity group than for a low entativity group. (Johnson and Qeuller 2003).
What cognitions are caused by vicarious retribution?
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Behavior
Vicarious Retribution is a specific type of aggression.
What interventions might reduce vicarious retribution?
The contact hypothesis?
- Reducing perceived outgroup entativity
- Publicity and expression of outgroup anger, shame, and guilt concerning the provocation.
- Publicity and expression of outgroup sympathy towards the victim.
Theory
What theories relate to Vicarious Retribution?
Vicarious Retribution builds upon aspects of Social Identity Theory and the General Aggression Model, in addition to the implicit theories of work done on displaced aggression and group based emotions.
Who
Who works on Vicarious Retribution?
Brian Lickel, Doug Stenstrom, Tom Denson, Ravi Iyer, and Norman Miller at the University of Southern California are currently involved in vicarious retribution research.
Other Resources
What other resources on Vicarious Retribution exist?
Much of this entry was taken from a revision of a paper submitted to PSPR by Brian Lickel as well as an unpublished empirical paper by Doug Stenstrom.
Another usefulresource is the website of Dr. Vincent Yzerbyt at http://www.psor.ucl.ac.be/personal/yzerbyt/
