Cooperation in social groups: reactions to (moral) deviants

The present dissertation examines the influence of self-involvement with perpetrators and victims on third-party reactions to deviants. Dealing with others’ social behaviors regulates social life and successful cooperation between interaction partners. Third-party reactions to deviants are sensitive to group context, and thereby more likely to protect ingroup interests. Such biased reactions raise the question of how much they are triggered by involvement (i.e., shared group membership, empathy) with perpetrators or victims of deviance. Three reported lines of research extend the current knowledge on cognitive (memory), emotional (anger), and behavioral (punishment) reactions to deviance within and between social groups. Research Line I examined whether accurate memory for persons’ social behavior is group-specific. The reported studies show that deviant ingroup members are remembered better than other ingroup and outgroup members (uncooperative or cheating). Guessing behavior indicates that participants assumed more cooperative ingroup members than outgroup members. Research Line II investigated whether involvement with victims is crucial for anger about deviance. Results show that the wrongfulness (i.e., perpetrator’s intentions) elicits more anger than the harmfulness (i.e., consequences for a cared-for-other) of deviance. Research Line III examined how involvement with perpetrators or victims influences anger and punishment of deviance. Anger and (altruistic) punishment emerge consistently as responses to unfairness, even in outgroup interactions. Negative reactions to ingroup perpetrators and victims varies with the contextual settings of the studies. Taken together, memory, anger, and punishment are sensitive to perpetrators’ and victims’ group memberships, and also emerge irrespective of self-involvement. The discussion addresses how such reactions facilitate social life and cooperation in groups

Dealing With the COVID-19 Pandemic: How Defense Strategies Relate to Empathic Reactions During Lockdowns

The COVID-19 pandemic with its substantial changes to social life affects social cognitions, which are important for solidarity during a global crisis. We investigated how distal defense strategies for dealing with threat, perceived threat, and contact experiences relate to people’s empathic reactions during lockdowns in two countries. In three studies ( N = 1,332), we found that more experienced threat is associated with higher personal distress. In Germany, but not in the United Kingdom, people who applied social defenses reported more empathic concern. Additionally, general positive contact experiences related positively to empathic concern and perspective taking. These other-directed empathic reactions correlated highly with solidarity with others across all studies. The findings indicate that people’s empathy changes with their social experiences during this global crisis

Illusory Correlations and Group-Based Expectations: The Influence of Increased Learning

People form skewed impressions about majority and minority groups, often leading to less favourable impressions of minority groups. This effect has been referred to as illusory correlations. However, increased learning about both groups was found to resolve such illusory correlations. The current study examines whether increased learning can similarly override group-based expectations. In an online experiment, participants were either assigned to the majority group or not, eliciting expectations of ingroup favouritism (Schaller & Maass, 1989). Additionally, some were informed about the size ratio of the groups, eliciting inter-category accentuation (McGarty et al., 1993). Participants then learned about positive (frequent) and negative (infrequent) behaviours in each group and repeatedly rated the groups’ likeability. The results show that likeability ratings of both groups became more positive with an increasing number of behavioural descriptions presented. Expectations related to majority membership led to ingroup biases that did not disappear with an increasing number of behavioural descriptions. Expectations related to group size information did not significantly influence likeability ratings. The results indicate that increased learning about both groups suppresses illusory correlations, but even more behavioural descriptions may be needed to override majority members’ ingroup biases

The role of feminist identity in coping with sexual objectification

The study is conducted online via SoSci Survey. The aim is to analyze the role of feminist identity in women's coping with sexual objectification experiences and to investigate possible positive indirect effects on self-esteem. This project focuses on two coping mechanisms proposed by Wei et al. (2010) in the context of discrimination: resistance and internalization. Established self-report measures of sexual objectification (ISOS; Kozee, Tylka & Augustus-Horvath, 2007), feminist identity (FIS; Szymanski, 2004), coping with discrimination (CDS; Wei et al. 2010), and situational self-esteem (Heatherton & Polivy, 1991) are used to collect data. In the spirit of intersectionality (Walgenbach, 2012), the sociodemographic questions also include brief descriptive items on sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability and religious affiliation. The study intends to address a previously identified research gap (Szymanski & Feltman, 2014). The research question will be examined in subjects who are at least 18 years old and identify as women

Registered Report: Do offenders differ in their attribution of second- and third-party punishment?

We propose an experiment investigating the differences in offenders’ motive attributions to punishment by victims (i.e., second-party punishment) and uninvolved observers (i.e., third-party punishment)