You gotta fight! – Why norm-violations and outgroup criticism lead to confrontational reactions

ABSTRACT

Group members frequently face group-related discrepancies, such as other group members violating group norms or outgroup members criticising the ingroup. In response, they often engage in confrontational reactions like expressing disapproval or excluding the person causing the discrepancy. The present work tests the often voiced but rarely studied idea that group-related discrepancies are met with such confrontational responses because discrepancies elicit feelings of threat. Our approach is inspired by research on threat-regulation, which links certain negative emotions to the activation of specific threat-regulatory systems. Three experiments (N_total = 680) provide evidence suggesting that group-related discrepancies foster emotions consistent with an activation of the Fight-Flight-Freeze-System (especially anger-related emotions tied to fight-tendencies), emotions consistent with an activation of the Behavioural Inhibition System (i.e. anxiety-related emotions), and confrontational intentions. The effect of discrepancies on confrontational intentions was mediated by heightened anger-related emotions. This supports the idea that confrontational reactions are driven by experienced threat and that these reactions are rightfully called confrontational. We discuss our results in relation to research on ingroup norm-violations, outgroup criticism, and threat perception.

KEYWORDS:

• Confrontation
• group norms
• Fight-Flight-Freeze-system
• Behavioural Inhibition System
• intragroup conflict

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank their research assistants for their support in completing this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability

The data and code that support the findings of this study are openly available for scientific use in the repository psycharchives.org. The data are available at https://doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.5196, the code can be found at https://doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.5197.

Notes

1 In Study 1, we additionally manipulated the effectiveness of the discrepancy's source. In Study 2, we additionally manipulated whether other group members (re-)affirmed the norm mentioned by the target group member. In both studies, we also assessed respondents’ intentions to leave the group (for details, see online supplements).

2 Analyses based on the scales as used in Study 1 reveal the same pattern of results for communication intentions, but the indirect effect via BIS-activation on exclusion intentions is no longer significant.

3 Compared to Study 2, we added the item “excited”[aufgeregt] to our BAS-scale. However, due to a low corrected item-total correlation r (156) = .11, it was not included into the scale.

4 When only the short scales from Study 1 were used, the result pattern remained unchanged.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.