A dual-motive model of scapegoating: displacing blame to reduce guilt or increase control

The authors present a model that specifies 2 psychological motives underlying scapegoating, defined as attributing inordinate blame for a negative outcome to a target individual or group, (a) maintaining perceived personal moral value by minimizing feelings of guilt over one's responsibility for a negative outcome and (b) maintaining perceived personal control by obtaining a clear explanation for a negative outcome that otherwise seems inexplicable. Three studies supported hypotheses derived from this dual-motive model. Framing a negative outcome (environmental destruction or climate change) as caused by one's own harmful actions (value threat) or unknown sources (control threat) both increased scapegoating, and these effects occurred indirectly through feelings of guilt and perceived personal control, respectively (Study 1), and were differentially moderated by affirmations of moral value and personal control (Study 2). Also, scapegoating in response to value threat versus control threat produced divergent, theoretically specified effects on self-perceptions and behavioral intentions (Study 3).     

Perceived discrimination as worldview threat or worldview confirmation: implications for self-esteem

In 3 studies, the authors tested the hypothesis that discrimination targets' worldview moderates the impact of perceived discrimination on self-esteem among devalued groups. In Study 1, perceiving discrimination against the ingroup was negatively associated with self-esteem among Latino Americans who endorsed a meritocracy worldview (e.g., believed that individuals of any group can get ahead in America and that success stems from hard work) but was positively associated with self-esteem among those who rejected this worldview. Study 2 showed that exposure to discrimination against their ingroup (vs. a non-self-relevant group) led to lower self-esteem, greater feelings of personal vulnerability, and ingroup blame among Latino Americans who endorsed a meritocracy worldview but to higher self-esteem and decreased ingroup blame among Latino Americans who rejected it. Study 3 showed that compared with women informed that prejudice against their ingroup is pervasive, women informed that prejudice against their ingroup is rare had higher self-esteem if they endorsed a meritocracy worldview but lower self-esteem if they rejected this worldview. Findings support the idea that perceiving discrimination against one's ingroup threatens the worldview of individuals who believe that status in society is earned but confirms the worldview of individuals who do not.     

Self-compassion promotes positive adjustment for people who attribute responsibility of a romantic breakup to themselves

Attributing responsibility for a romantic breakup to the self can have dual effects on psychological adjustment, exacerbating disruptive thoughts and feelings, yet also increasing the likelihood of positive changes. Three studies (N = 441) examined whether these dual effects associated with attributing responsibility for a romantic breakup to the self are moderated by self-compassion. Supporting this assertion, trait self-compassion predicted better romantic outlook (Studies 1 & 2), and induced self-compassion predicted greater intended future romantic partner appreciation (Study 3), among people who attributed greater responsibility of a breakup to themselves. In addition, higher trait (Study 2) and induced self-compassion (Study 3) boosted self-improvement motivation with regard to future relationships among participants who attributed responsibility of a romantic breakup to themselves. These adjustment-promoting tendencies associated with self-compassion held controlling for a range of variables known to impact romantic breakup adjustment (e.g., self-esteem, attachment styles, and prior relationship characteristics). We discuss possible mechanisms for these effects and broader implications for future self-compassion research.     

Contemporary Psychotherapy: Promoting Personal Responsibility for Therapeutic Change

An assortment of factors in modern society can be involved in the etiology and treatment of mental illness. Theories about etiology usually underlie, and therefore guide, most strategies for treatment. Although a comprehensive bio-psycho-social approach to mental illness can help to foster the collaboration of an interdisciplinary treatment team, a heavy emphasis on biological factors or cultural deprivation may reduce the client's feelings of personal responsibility for change. Contemporary psychotherapy can help clients reduce their tendency to attribute blame to biological predispositions or external societal factors. Instead, it is more helpful to cultivate attributions for personal responsibility for change, growth, and maturation.     

Anger: Scary Good

I argue that recent attempts to vindicate blame have failed to fully face the vengeful feelings and angry outbursts that have led to scepticism about blame’s ethical status. This paper endeavours to fill that gap. I claim that feelings of angry blame are characteristically responsive to threats to social status, and that angry expressions are distinctive because of their scariness. Still, I conclude, there is an important place for angry blame in good lives and good relationships. In offering a defence of angry feelings and expressions, I argue that blame’s seemingly objectionable features are crucial to its expressive and restorative power.     

Sadly,you made me earn it: The effect of responsibility attributions for sadness on food indulgence

This article addresses the mixed findings of prior studies regarding hedonic food indulgence in sadness. Building upon the idea that self‐licensing may underlie the effect of sadness on food indulgence, the current research identifies responsibility attributions, namely, whether consumers attribute the cause of their sadness to themselves or to others, as an important factor that may affect sense of deservingness, and consequently affect hedonic food consumption in sadness. Four experiments show that sadness enhances food indulgence more when consumers attribute the responsibility for their sadness to others rather than to themselves. Specifically, findings show that (a) when self‐responsibility attributions are unlikely, sadness increases chocolate consumption; (b) sadness leads to a greater sense of deservingness and enhanced food indulgence when people hold others rather than themselves responsible for their sadness; and (c) the responsibility attribution effect on food indulgence in sadness is more pronounced at high levels of sadness and when the event that triggered one's sadness is significant. These findings contribute to our understanding of the factors that influence food indulgence in sadness.     

Fluid compensation following threats to self-concept clarity

We examined defensive responses to self-clarity threats, finding that self-uncertain participants gave larger rewards to a social hero, but larger punishments to a social transgressor, than self-certain participants (Study 1). To examine whether there are individual differences in defensiveness to meaning threats, we included moderators, showing that high self-esteem individuals (HSE) thinking about self-inconsistencies gave more polarized evaluations of someone criticizing vs. complimenting their ingroup than self-consistent HSEs (Study 2). We found similar responses to a relational self-clarity threat, among individuals for whom relationships are self-defining (Study 3). Results held controlling for the impact of the self-clarity manipulations on self-esteem. This research is compatible with the meaning maintenance model, which stipulates that various meaning threats elicit fluid compensatory efforts designed to restore general feelings of meaningfulness. We discuss limitations and future directions.     

Sinful flesh: Sexual objectification threatens women's moral self

The current investigation examined whether sexual objectification leads to perceived contamination in women victims, which, in turn, triggers sinful feelings. The results of three experiments provide converging support for these predictions. Female participants reported greater sinful feelings than their non-objectified counterparts, after receiving objectifying comments on their physical appearance from an alleged male partner (Experiment 1) or recalling a past experience of objectification (Experiments 2 and 3). Furthermore, perceived contamination mediated the effect of objectification on sinful feelings. We also found that perceived personal responsibility of being objectified moderated the above effects, such that the effects were only observed among participants who perceived themselves as highly responsible for objectification experience, but not among those who perceived low personal responsibility. These findings contribute to the literature by explaining why objectification elicits sinful feelings in female victims and who is more susceptible to this influence.     

Coalition or derogation? How perceived discrimination influences intraminority intergroup relations

Five studies explored how perceived societal discrimination against one's own racial group influences racial minority group members' attitudes toward other racial minorities. Examining Black-Latino relations, Studies 1a and 1b showed that perceived discrimination toward oneself and one's own racial group may be positively associated with expressed closeness and common fate with another racial minority group, especially if individuals attribute past experiences of discrimination to their racial identity rather than to other social identities (Study 1b). In Studies 2-5, Asian American (Studies 2, 3, and 4) and Latino (Study 5) participants were primed with discrimination against their respective racial groups (or not) and completed measures of attitudes toward Black Americans. Participants primed with racial discrimination expressed greater positivity toward and perceived similarity with Blacks than did participants who were not primed. These results suggest, consistent with the common ingroup identity model (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000), that salient discrimination against one's own racial group may trigger a common "disadvantaged racial minority" (ingroup) identity that engenders more positive attitudes toward and feelings of closeness toward other racial minorities.     

RESPONSIBLE AGENCY: A HUMAN DISTINCTIVE?

While agent responsibility appears to be one of the clearest examples of a human distinctive, practices of holding responsible are bound up with social expectations and emotional reactions, many of which are shared with other social animals. This essay attends to the ways in which what Peter Strawson first identified as the reactive emotions, including notably anger, resentment, and indignation, are key to making sense of both the shared and distinctive features of responsible human agency. Like human beings, other social animals express a range of reactive emotions in response to others’ conformity with or violation of implicit social expectations and norms; human beings sometimes reflect on these reactive attitudes and their justifiability, asking whether and when it is appropriate to hold others accountable, blame, and/or punish them. We should recognize that we often praise and blame others for attitudes and desires which they have not chosen and over which they have no direct control, and that this is appropriate.     

Affective disgust predicts blame for gay male homicide victims

For certain crimes there is a tendency in the United States to blame individuals for their victimization. Previous work has shown that affective states can impact blame attribution. Drawing upon this work, the purpose of the current pre-registered research was to examine the relation between affective disgust and victim blame attribution. In Study 1, as participants’ (N = 203) level of implicit disgust associations with gay men increased, their tendency to blame a gay male homicide victim also increased, whereas their agreement that the homicide qualified as a hate crime decreased. In Study 2, disgust was experimentally induced by exposing participants (N = 431) to disgusting (e.g., vomit, insects) or neutral images (e.g., mug, stapler). Inducing disgust increased victim blame and decreased perceptions that the homicide constituted a hate crime. However, exploratory mediation analyses in both studies showed that the impact of disgust on hate crime applications is best explained as an indirect effect of victim blame. Taken together, these findings suggest that both individual differences in implicit gay-disgust and situational feelings of disgust may underlie people’s perceptions of how blameworthy a victim is for the crime committed against them.     

The role of consumer ethical beliefs in product‐harm crises

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the consumer reaction during a product‐harm crisis by examining the interdependencies that exist among their ethical beliefs as consumers, their attributions of blame, their feelings of anger and finally their purchase intentions towards the affected company. To test the five research hypotheses, a questionnaire containing a hypothetical crisis scenario of a fictitious company was distributed to 277 consumers. Respondents were asked to read the scenario and answer questions regarding their attribution of responsibility to the company, their feelings of anger and their purchase intentions. In order to investigate consumers' ethical beliefs, a Consumer Ethics Scale was also included in the questionnaire. Structural equation modelling revealed a significant, positive correlation between attributions of blame, anger and ethical beliefs. Moreover, anger negatively affects purchase intentions, whereas the attribution of blame was not found to be significantly connected to purchase intentions. In spite of the rational connection between ethics and crisis, there is lack of research correlating these two concepts. Based on this gap in the literature, the current research attempts to connect ethical beliefs with consumer reactions and emotions during product‐harm crises. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

When the Boss Feels Inadequate: Power, Incompetence, and Aggression

ABSTRACT— When and why do power holders seek to harm other people? The present research examined the idea that aggression among the powerful is often the result of a threatened ego. Four studies demonstrated that individuals with power become aggressive when they feel incompetent in the domain of power. Regardless of whether power was measured in the workplace (Studies 1 and 4), manipulated via role recall (Study 2), or assigned in the laboratory (Study 3), it was associated with heightened aggression when paired with a lack of self-perceived competence. As hypothesized, this aggression appeared to be driven by ego threat: Aggressiveness was eliminated among participants whose sense of self-worth was boosted (Studies 3 and 4). Taken together, these findings suggest that (a) power paired with self-perceived incompetence leads to aggression, and (b) this aggressive response is driven by feelings of ego defensiveness. Implications for research on power, competence, and aggression are discussed.     

Anger, Blame, and Dimensions of Perceived Norm Violations: Culture, Gender, and Relationships

From a social cognitive perspective on anger, we attempted to examine the structure of perceived norm violations and their relationships with anger. We asked 884 university students from 4 countries (United States, Germany, Japan, and Hong Kong) to rate their experiences of being harmed in terms of norm violations, angry feelings, blame, and relationship with the harm doers. We found 2 culturally common dimensions in perceived norm violations (informal interpersonal norms and formal societal norms), and these dimensions substantially increased both angry feelings and blame in almost all cultural groups. The violation of interpersonal norms generally evoked anger more frequently than that of societal norms, but there were interactions between culture and relationship closeness and between gender and relationship closeness.     

Is the igeneration a ‘we’ generation? Social networking use among 9‐ to 13‐year‐olds and belonging

Research suggests that online communication is associated with increased closeness to friends and friendship quality. Children under 13 years of age are increasingly using social networking sites (SNSs), but research with this younger age group is scarce. This study examined the relationship between SNS use and feelings of belonging among children aged 9–13 years. A self‐report questionnaire was administered to 443 children (48.98% boys), asking about their SNS use and their sense of belonging to their friendship group. SNS users reported a stronger sense of belonging to their friendship group than non‐users, but this was found only among older boys. Furthermore, among boy SNS users, a positive linear relationship was found between the intensity of usage and feelings of belonging. No significant relationships were found for girls. These findings suggest that boys who use these sites are gaining friendship benefits over and above those boys who are non‐users or low‐intensity users. Longitudinal studies should investigate the causal relationships between SNS use and social effects within this age group.     

Manipulating Morality: Third‐Party Intentions Alter Moral Judgments by Changing Causal Reasoning

The present studies investigate how the intentions of third parties influence judgments of moral responsibility for other agents who commit immoral acts. Using cases in which an agent acts under some situational constraint brought about by a third party, we ask whether the agent is blamed less for the immoral act when the third party intended for that act to occur. Study 1 demonstrates that third‐party intentions do influence judgments of blame. Study 2 finds that third‐party intentions only influence moral judgments when the agent's actions precisely match the third party's intention. Study 3 shows that this effect arises from changes in participants' causal perception that the third party was controlling the agent. Studies 4 and 5, respectively, show that the effect cannot be explained by changes in the distribution of blame or perceived differences in situational constraint faced by the agent.     

Attributional differences for driving while impaired: a comparison of alcoholics, inmates, and impaired drivers

This study examines the differences among attributions for reasons for arrest and attributions for blame among groups of Canadian alcoholics, correctional facility inmates, and impaired drivers. Multiple-recidivist impaired driving offenders were more likely to attribute blame for impaired driving behavior to the mental-element factor alcoholism, even though they possessed lower General Alcoholism Scale (Wanberg, Horn, & Foster, 1977) scores than alcoholic subjects. They did not differ in their attributions to luck versus motivation or to general driving ability in their assessment of the reasons for arrest but did view the task of driving well while drunk as being less difficult than other groups. Inconsistencies in responses regarding responsibility for behavior are related to attribution theories which differentiate between perceptions of controllability and intentionality.     

When past meets present: the relationship between website‐induced nostalgia and well‐being

The present research examined whether social media websites increase feelings of nostalgia, and whether this nostalgic reverie promotes psychological and social health. Specifically, in comparison to control conditions, participants exposed to the websites Dear Old Love and Dear Photograph reported greater feelings of nostalgia (Studies 1–3), positive affect (Studies 1 and 3), life satisfaction (Study 1), and relationship need satisfaction (Study 2). Further, mediational analyses revealed that increased thoughts of nostalgia heightened subjective well‐being and social connectedness. Study 3 showed that the relationship between nostalgia and positive affect was specific to the Dear Photograph website and did not generalize to any website focused on close relationships. The implications of this research for nostalgia, internet use, and well‐being are further discussed.     

An evidence-based group coping intervention for women living with HIV and history of childhood sexual abuse

Women living with HIV/AIDS and a history of childhood sexual abuse often exhibit sexual trauma symptoms and elevated rates of HIV-risk behaviors. In this paper, we describe a coping skills group intervention that reduced traumatic stress and sexual-risk behavior in a recent randomized clinical trial. We focused on clinical issues that emerged among female participants receiving the intervention. Clinical observations showed that recognizing connections between trauma, psychological distress, and high risk behaviors was a new and powerful experience for many participants. Participants successfully applied psychoeducational material, expressing an increased sense of power and control over their relationships and behaviors as they developed more adaptive cognitive and behavioral skills. Women expressed high levels of satisfaction with the intervention. Recommendations for clinical practice are provided.