Social Rejection and Mass Violence

描述（由申请人提供）：计划中的研究考察了一个假设影响伤害多人的侵略行为的过程（即大规模暴力）。自然主义研究和对照实验表明，社会排斥是攻击性的先决条件。然而，拒绝不能完全解释伤害多人的侵略行为- -特别是当多名受害者没有直接拒绝犯罪者时。我们提出排斥与群体感知协同作用影响群体暴力。被突出群体成员拒绝的个体可能会将拒绝与该群体联系起来，并随后对所有群体成员进行报复。两个实验和问卷调查为协同效应提供了初步证据。实验操纵了拒绝和感知群体，并证明了这些因素的相互作用，使参与者对一群人的行为最具攻击性

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The planned research examines a process hypothesized to affect aggression that harms multiple persons (i.e., mass violence). Naturalistic studies and controlled experiments identify social rejection as an antecedent of aggression. Rejection, however, cannot account exclusively for aggression that harms multiple persons - particularly when the multiple victims did not directly reject the perpetrator. It is proposed that rejection functions synergistically with perceived groupness to affect mass violence. Individuals rejected by a member of a salient group might associate rejection with the group and, subsequently, retaliate against all group members. Two experiments and a questionnaire provide preliminary evidence for the synergistic effect. The experiments manipulated rejection and perceived groupness and demonstrated that those factors interacted such that participants behaved most aggressively against an aggregate of persons when a member of the aggregate rejected the participant and the aggregate appeared to be an entity-like group. The questionnaire study replicated those results by demonstrating that the frequency with which high school students fantasize about harming social groups varies as an interactive function of their rejection experience with the groups and the extent to which they perceive the groups to be entity-like. Two proposed studies expand the preliminary evidence and explore moderators and mediators of the synergistic effect. Study 1 examines if individual differences associated with perceived groupness influence the tendency for rejected persons to generalize aggression against all members of a social aggregate. Study 2 tests if cognitive/affective associations formed between the rejection experience and the salient group mediate the synergistic effect of rejection and groupness on mass violence.