Outgroup Victims Research Articles

When to intervene and take a stand: Evaluating bystander roles in intergroup name‐calling contexts

AbstractChildren (n = 121, M = 9.86 years, SD = 0.64) and adolescents (n = 101, M = 12.84 years, SD = 0.69) evaluated proactive and passive bystander behaviour to intergroup name‐calling (N = 222, 54% female). Scenarios depicted ingroup perpetrators and outgroup victims who were from a stigmatized group (ethnicity) or a non‐stigmatized group (school affiliation), with bystanders depicted as being proactive (intervening to help) or passive (failing to challenge the aggression), counter to their own group's norm. Children and adolescents personally evaluated proactive bystanders more favourably than passive bystanders. However, adolescents, more than children, expected their peers to be more positive about proactive bystanders than passive bystanders in the stigmatized context. Results are discussed in terms of the complexities of bystander decisions and implications for anti‐bullying interventions.

Everybody hurts (sometimes): The role of victim category accessibility in prosocial responses towards victimized outgroups.

Collective victimization can lead to competitiveness and reduced willingness to act on behalf of other victimized groups, but in some cases increases prosocial responses. We propose the concept of victim category accessibility (VCA) as one explanation for different reactions to victimization. Assuming that 'victims' is one among many categories into which individuals classify themselves and others, high VCA should increase the common categorization of ingroup and outgroup members as victims and increase prosocial responses towards victimized outgroups. Conversely, low VCA should increase the difficulty of identifying commonalities between ingroup and outgroup victims and reduce prosocial responses. In three studies, we develop a novel measure of VCA based on the Indirect Category Accessibility Task and demonstrate its association with willingness to act on behalf of victimized outgroups, but not ingroup members, beyond self-reported beliefs about victimization. The findings suggest a key role for VCA in understanding prosocial responses towards victimized outgroups.

Should I invite them? Bystanders' inclusivity judgements towards outgroup victims and ingroup bullies in intergroup bullying

AbstractThis study examined bystanders' judgements of bullying and their inclusivity towards refugee victims and ingroup bully peers. Participants included 587 Turkish adolescents (Mage = 13.14, SD = 1.60) who were presented with two stories: intergroup (Syrian refugee victim) and intragroup (Turkish victim) bullying. They indicated acceptability of bullying, retaliation, and how likely they would be to include victims and bullies in different social contexts. Empathy, prejudice, desired social distance, and peer norms towards Syrian refugees were examined as predictors. Adolescents in schools with a higher number of Syrian peers were more likely to expect they would include the Syrian victim than adolescents in schools with a lower number of Syrian peers. Further, adolescents with higher empathy were more likely to include the Syrian victim while adolescents with higher prejudice and desired social distance were less likely to include the Syrian victim. The results highlight the importance of attending to bystanders' future interactions with victims and bullies, as bystanders have the opportunity to challenge injustice by promoting inclusive school climates in diverse societies. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.

Donations to Outgroup Charities, but Not Ingroup Charities, Predict Helping Intentions Toward Street-Beggars in Sweden

This article investigates how donation behavior to charitable organizations and helping intentions toward begging European Union (EU)-migrants are related. This question was tested by analyzing survey responses from 1,050 participants sampled from the general Swedish population. Although the overall results suggested that donations to charitable organizations were positively related to helping intentions toward beggars, the results differed substantially as a function of whether the organization was perceived to focus its efforts on outgroup victims or on ingroup victims. Specifically, whereas donation behavior toward outgroup-focused organizations clearly predicted more helping intentions toward beggars (also when controlling for demographics, education, income, religiosity, and political inclination), donation behavior toward ingroup-focused organizations predicted slightly less helping intentions toward beggars. We conclude that the type of charitable organization a person donates to might tell us more about his or her values and preferences than merely whether or not he or she donates at all.

Intergroup Bias Influences Third-Party Punishment and Compensation: In-group Relationships Attenuate Altruistic Punishment

Intergroup relationships can impact on a third party's willingness to punish a violator, but few researchers have explored how intergroup relationships affect third-party compensation tendencies. We recruited 163 participants to observe a dictator game, and then choose either to punish the dictator or compensate the recipient, each of whom could be from the participant's in-group or out-group. Third parties often chose not to punish in-group dictators and to compensate both in-group victims and out-group victims. When out-group members transgressed against the in-group, participants punished these out-group members just as often as they compensated the in-group recipients, although they punished out-group dictators more harshly than others overall. However, when both proposer and recipient came from the out-group, participants often did not intervene. We also found that third-party punishment and compensation were related to individual differences in participants' trait empathy and Machiavellianism. Our findings shed light on the modulating effect of intergroup relationships on third-party altruistic decisions.

The Existential Underpinnings of Intergroup Helping: When Normative and Defensive Motivations Collide.

Five studies examined defensive intergroup helping-when responsibility for an out-group victim's injury decreases helping, whereas lack of responsibility increases helping when death is salient. In Study 1 ( N = 350), implicit death primes increased petition signings to allow a Palestinian child to receive medical treatment in Israel, when the child was a victim of Palestinian fire. When the child was a victim of Israeli fire, however, death primes decreased petition signings. Study 2 ( N = 200) partially replicated these effects on commitment to donate blood to an injured Palestinian child. Study 3 ( N = 162) found that moral affirmation primes moderate defensive helping effects. Study 4 ( N = 372) replicated defensive helping, but failed to replicate the moral affirmation effect found in Study 3. Study 5 ( N = 243) partially replicated defensive helping and found that different framings of existential threat moderate the effect. Overall, results indicate that self-protective concerns underlie prosocial responses to out-group members in need.

Children’s evaluations of interethnic exclusion: The effects of ethnic boundaries, respondent ethnicity, and majority in-group bias

Two vignette studies were conducted in which preadolescent children (Study 1: N=542; Study 2: N=137; aged 8–13years) evaluated the exclusion, for unknown reasons, of an immigrant minority child by a native majority peer (majority interethnic exclusion). Study 1 compared children’s evaluations of majority interethnic exclusion with their evaluations of (majority and minority) intraethnic exclusion and minority interethnic exclusion, and Study 2 examined children’s underlying explanations. Each study compared ethnic majority and ethnic minority respondents and examined the role of in-group bias for the former. Overall, both ethnic majority and ethnic minority respondents regarded majority interethnic exclusion more negatively than the other exclusion types (majority intraethnic, minority interethnic, and minority intraethnic). All children, but especially older minority respondents, were more likely to reject majority interethnic exclusion if they perceived it to be discriminatory (ethnicity based). Among the majority children, a strong in-group bias was associated with a weaker condemnation of majority interethnic exclusion, but this was not due to a larger tolerance of ethnicity-based discrimination. Biased majority children were also less likely to reject minority intraethnic exclusion, indicating an overall weaker concern for out-group victims. Taken together, the studies show that children are relatively negative about majority (prototypical) interethnic exclusion because it implies the possibility of ethnic discrimination, and they concur with previous evidence for a developmental increase in the awareness of discrimination in ethnic minority youths.

Choice-justifications after allocating resources in helping dilemmas

AbstractHow do donors reason and justify their choices when faced with dilemmas in a charitable context? In two studies, Swedish students were confronted with helping dilemmas based on the identifiable victim effect, the proportion dominance effect and the ingroup effect. Each dilemma consisted of two comparable charity projects and participants were asked to choose one project over the other. They were then asked to provide justifications of their choice by stating the relative importance of different types of reasons. When faced with an identified victim dilemma, participants did not choose the project including an identified victim more often than the project framed statistically, but those who did emphasized emotional reasons (e.g., “Because I had more empathic feelings”), but not any other reasons, more than those choosing the statistical project. When faced with a Proportion dominance dilemma, participants more often chose the project with a high rescue proportion (e.g., you can save 100% out of 30) than the project with a low rescue proportion (e.g., you can save 4% out of 800), and those who did emphasized efficacy reasons (e.g., “Because my money can make a greater difference there”), but no other reasons, more than those favoring the low recue proportion project. Finally, when faced with an Ingroup dilemma, participants more often chose the project that could help ingroup-victims over the project that could help outgroup victims, and those who did emphasized responsibility reasons (e.g., “Because I have a greater obligation”), but no other reasons, more than those favoring outgroup projects. These results are consistent with and extend previous findings about how different helping effects are related to different psychological processes.

Social Identification and Corporate Irresponsibility: A Model of Stakeholder Punitive Intentions

Scholars hypothesize that retaliations against corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) are more likely when observers share the social identity of the victims. We present a model that explains in‐group bias against irresponsibility and identify collective narcissism as a moderator of this effect. Experiment 1 demonstrates that the effect of identity on retaliations is mediated by the perceived similarity of the victims which reinforces feelings of sympathy towards the victims and anger towards the corporation. These emotions drive stakeholders’ attitudes and retaliations. Our study shows that appraisals of the victims of CSI are an important antecedent of stakeholders’ emotions and behavioural intentions. Our evidence also demonstrates that sympathy, an emotion neglected by past research in this area, has a unique effect on individuals’ reactions. Experiment 2 demonstrates that social identity biases in individual punitive intentions are moderated by individuals’ level of collective narcissism. Collective narcissists see out‐group victims as very dissimilar from the self, whereas individuals with low levels of collective narcissism do not differentiate between victims of CSI on the basis of their identity. We extend knowledge on stakeholders’ reactions to CSI and offer insights to organizations promoting campaigns against irresponsible behaviour or managing the fallout from cases of corporate irresponsibility.

Evaluations of moral and conventional intergroup transgressions.

To investigate children's understanding of intergroup transgressions, children (3-8years, N=84) evaluated moral and conventional transgressions that occurred among members of the same gender group (ingroup) or members of different gender groups (outgroup). All participants judged moral transgressions to be more wrong than conventional transgressions. However, when asked to make a judgment after being told an authority figure did not see the transgression, younger participants still judged that moral violations were less acceptable than conventional transgressions, but judged both moral and conventional transgressions with an outgroup victim as more acceptable than the corresponding transgressions with an ingroup victim. Older children did not demonstrate the same ingroup bias; rather they focused only on the domain of the transgressions. The results demonstrate the impact intergroup information has on children's evaluations about both moral and conventional transgressions.

The development of bystander intentions and social-moral reasoning about intergroup verbal aggression.

A developmental intergroup approach was taken to examine the development of prosocial bystander intentions among children and adolescents. Participants as bystanders (N=260) aged 8-10 and 13-15years were presented with scenarios of direct aggression between individuals from different social groups (i.e., intergroup verbal aggression). These situations involved either an ingroup aggressor and an outgroup victim or an outgroup aggressor and an ingroup victim. This study focussed on the role of intergroup factors (group membership, ingroup identification, group norms, and social-moral reasoning) in the development of prosocial bystander intentions. Findings showed that prosocial bystander intentions declined with age. This effect was partially mediated by the ingroup norm to intervene and perceived severity of the verbal aggression. However, a moderated mediation analysis showed that only when the victim was an ingroup member and the aggressor an outgroup member did participants become more likely with age to report prosocial bystander intentions due to increased ingroup identification. Results also showed that younger children focussed on moral concerns and adolescents focussed more on psychological concerns when reasoning about their bystander intention. These novel findings help explain the developmental decline in prosocial bystander intentions from middle childhood into early adolescence when observing direct intergroup aggression.

Feeling like a group after a natural disaster: Common ingroup identity and relations with outgroup victims among majority and minority young children.

We conducted a field study to test whether the common ingroup identity model (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000, reducing intergroup bias: The common ingroup identity model. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press) could be a useful tool to improve intergroup relations in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Participants were majority (Italian) and minority (immigrant) elementary school children (N=517) living in the area struck by powerful earthquakes in May 2012. Results revealed that, among majority children, the perceived external threat represented by the earthquake was associated with greater perceptions of belonging to a common ingroup including both ingroup and outgroup. In turn, heightened one-group perceptions were associated with greater willingness to meet and help outgroup victims, both directly and indirectly via more positive outgroup attitudes. Among immigrant children, perceived disaster threat was not associated with any of the dependent variables; one-group perceptions were positively associated with outgroup attitudes, helping and contact intentions towards outgroup victims. Thus, one-group perceptions after a natural disaster may promote more positive and supporting relations between the majority and the minority group. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.

Increased Moral Sensitivity for Outgroup Perpetrators Harming Ingroup Members.

From an evolutionary perspective, one should be more sensitive when outgroup members attack the ingroup but less so when ingroup or outgroup members fight among themselves. Indeed, previous behavioral and neuroimaging research demonstrated that people show greater sensitivity for the suffering of ingroup compared with outgroup members. However, the question still remains whether this is always the case regardless of who is the agent causing the harm. To examine the role of agency and group membership in perception of harm, 48 participants were scanned while viewing ingroup or outgroup perpetrators intentionally harming ingroup or outgroup members. Behavioral results showed greater moral sensitivity for ingroup versus outgroup victims, but only when the perpetrator was from the outgroup. In support of this finding, fMRI data showed greater activity in left orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) for ingroup victims when they were harmed by outgroup individuals. In addition, effective connectivity analyses documented an increased coupling between left OFC and left amygdala and insula for ingroup harm, when the perpetrator was from the outgroup. Together these results indicate that we are highly sensitive to harm perpetrated by outgroup members and that increased sensitivity for ingroup victims is dependent on who is the agent of the action.

受害者无辜和群体类型对公正世界信念构成威胁的影响

以某校40名大学生为被试，通过使用内隐测量的实验范式考察了受害者无辜和群体类型对公正世界信念构成威胁的影响。研究结果表明：1) 内群体的受害者比外群体的受害者对人们的公正世界信念构成威胁的影响更大；2) 当面对无辜受害者时，内群体的受害者比外群体的受害者对人们的公正世界信念构成威胁的影响更大。当面对非无辜受害者时，内、外群体的受害者对人们的公正世界信念构成威胁的影响都不显著。在外群体的情况下，无论受害者是否无辜对人们的公正世界信念构成威胁的影响不显著。 With forty Chinese college students as participants, this study was designed based on the experimental paradigm of implicit measures exploring the influence of the victim’s innocence and the group category on the threat to the belief in a just world. The results of the experimental study showed that: 1) an in-group victim threatened people’s BJW more than an out-group victim did; 2) in an innocent victim condition, an in-group victim had more threatens to people’s BJW than that an out-group victim had. However, in a non-innocent victim condition, there was no significant influence on people’s BJW no matter the victim was an in-group member or an out-group member. However, it was not different in the out-group condition no matter people faced an innocent victim or a non-innocent victim.

“Crime against Humanity” or “Crime against Jews”? Acknowledgment in Construals of the Holocaust and Its Importance for Intergroup Relations

This article examines the consequences of different representations of the Holocaust for intergroup relations, focusing on the role of acknowledgment of different groups’ fate that is inherent in these construals. Holocaust representations have become increasingly universal. Research on recategorization suggests prosocial outcomes of such superordinate representations. However, among minority groups, acknowledging both superordinate and subgroup identities may be crucial in order to prevent backlash. An experimental study among Jewish and non‐Jewish participants (N = 163) was conducted to test these ideas. As hypothesized, prosocial responses to outgroup victims of collective violence and acknowledgment of their suffering increased among Jewish participants when both a superordinate categorization of the Holocaust and subgroup (Jewish) fate were presented, compared to when only one of these categorizations were used. Conversely, different categorizations did not affect outcomes among the control group. Practical implications for intergroup relations and memorialization in the aftermath of genocide are discussed.

Effects of Victim Innocence and BJW (Belief in a Just World) Upon Derogation of an Ingroup/Outgroup Victim

According to the BJW (belief in a just world) theory, a person is more likely to derogate a victim when that victim threatens their BJW. An innocent victim and a victim who is more similar (an ingroup member) are more threatening to a person’s BJW than a non-innocent outgroup victim with such a threat resulting in greater victim derogation. In the present study, group membership and victim innocence were manipulated. Group membership was based on status (college students vs. non-college students). College students (n = 162) were randomly assigned to either a BJW threating or BJW confirming condition. A 2 × 2 × 2 ANOVA (analysis of variance) found an interaction between the BJW manipulation and group membership; participants whose BJW was threatened derogated the non-student (outgroup) more than the control. Contrary to expected results, the college student (ingroup) victim was not as highly derogated as the outgroup member. We suggest that more subtle social categories (not just differences associated with traditional racial or ethnic prejudice) may influence the ways individuals defend or reestablish their BJW.

Can happy mood reduce the just world bias? Affective influences on blaming the victim

Do temporary moods influence people's tendency to blame victims for undeserved negative events? Based on research on the just world effect and recent affect theories, this experiment predicted and found that positive mood decreased and negative mood increased people's motivation to blame innocent victims for their misadventures. Participants ( N = 70) were induced into positive or negative mood by viewing films, and subsequently read a newspaper article describing a random assault on either a fellow student (in-group member) or a corporate employee (out-group member). Their reactions were assessed on three measures: attributions of responsibility, dissociation from the victim and character evaluations. Positive mood reduced and negative mood increased the tendency to blame the victim, and in-group victims were blamed more than out-group victims. These results are discussed in terms of recent theories of affect and motivation, and their implications for real-life social judgments are considered.

Norms regarding secondary victimization of bullying victims: Do they differ according to the victim’s categorization?

Two studies with a 2 valence of the image (positive, negative) x 2 victim's category (ingroup; outgroup) between-subjects design, investigated the existence of prescriptive norms regarding secondary victimization of bullying victims as well as the influence of the categorization of the victim on those same prescriptive norms among 7th graders. Study 1 addressed a scenario of physical bullying. Study 2 addressed a scenario of verbal bullying combined with social exclusion. Results showed that norms prescribe that the ingroup victim of physical bullying should be the least secondarily victimized. Furthermore it was found that for both types of bullying a positive image can be conveyed by secondarily victimizing more an outgroup victim than an ingroup victim.

Effects of Ingroup Bias and Gender Role Violations on Acquaintance Rape Attributions

Two studies of ethnically diverse US college students from northern California examined whether ingroup bias and gender norm violations influence acquaintance rape attributions (Study 1, N = 118; Study 2, N = 140). Participants read vignettes depicting acquaintance rape and completed questionnaires. Victims were part of participants’ ingroup or outgroup. Study 1 manipulated the victim’s sexual history (chaste or promiscuous). Study 2 manipulated the victim’s alcohol use (sober or intoxicated). Ingroup victims were perceived more positively than outgroup victims if the victims were promiscuous or intoxicated. More guilt was attributed to rapists of ingroup victims than outgroup victims if the victims were promiscuous or intoxicated. Findings are examined in relation to ingroup bias and gender norm violations.

Adaptations for exploitation.

Human groups contain reproductively relevant resources that differ greatly in their ease of accessibility. The authors advance a conceptual framework for the study of 2 classes of adaptations that have been virtually unexplored: (a) adaptations for exploitation designed to expropriate the resources of others through deception, manipulation, coercion, intimidation, terrorization, and force and (b) antiexploitation adaptations that evolved to prevent one from becoming a victim of exploitation. As soon as adaptations for exploitation evolved, they would immediately select for coevolved antiexploitation defenses—adaptations in target individuals, their kin, and their social allies designed to prevent their becoming a victim of exploitation. Antiexploitation defenses, in turn, created satellite adaptive problems for those pursuing a strategy of exploitation. Selection would favor the evolution of anticipatory and in situ solutions designed to circumvent the victim’s defenses and minimize the costs of pursuing an exploitative strategy. Adaptations for exploitation have design features sensitive to the group dynamics in which they are deployed, including status hierarchies, social reputation, and the preferential selection of out-group victims.