Moral and angry emotions provoked by informal social control

Abstract

Informal social control is the communication of disapproval by one individual to another individual (the perpetrator) who has transgressed a social norm. The present research examined the conditions under which social control provokes moral versus angry emotions in the perpetrator. The roles of perceived deviance and the appraisal of the legitimacy of social control as predictors of these emotions were specifically considered. In two studies, participants imagined themselves in situations in which they engaged in moderately uncivil acts and then received social control (or not). Perpetrators’ perception of the deviance of their behaviour (Studies 1 and 2), and their explicit appraisals of the legitimacy of social control were measured (Study 2). Moral and angry emotions were also assessed. Social control intensified moral and particularly angry emotions, compared to situations in which deviant acts were performed, but no social control was received. In addition, perceived deviance as well as the politeness of the social control importantly influenced angry emotions through their effects on appraised legitimacy.

Notes

¹This should be understood as the transgression of “norms of respect”.

²The scenarios varied in whether or not they described legal and counter-normative versus illegal behaviour. For instance, it is against the law to litter in France while it is not against the law to cut in front of someone in line. Since our concern was to select counter-normative scenarios, we conducted a pretest to examine further the nature of the scenarios. In the pretest, university students from the same population as the main studies (N=35) read one of the four scenario (without social control and in the alone social context) and rated the extent to which they thought the act was: (a) counter the norms of French society; (b) against the law in the French system; and also the extent to which (c) one risked receiving a fine for having committed this behaviour. Ratings were made on 7-point scales (from 0 = not at all to 6 = absolutely). A MANOVA conducted on participants’ three ratings revealed no differences between the four scenarios in their perceived counter-normativity, perceived legality, or in the anticipation to be fined. Furthermore, paired t-tests comparing perceived deviance and perceived legality for all the behaviours showed that people considered them to deviate more from the social norms (M=3.83, SD=1.67) than the law (M=2.28, SD=1.87), t(34) = 5.47, p<.001.

³Discussions with bilinguals suggests that different forms of the French words for feeling aggressive and being aggressive toward someone are more common and perhaps less strong or at least less unacceptable to use than in the English language. For example, to say that someone “aggressed me” (“m'agresse”) is a common way to say that that a person expressed anger overtly.

⁴The perceived deviance scores were analysed in a 2 (Social Control: absent, present)×2 (Context: alone, friend) within-subjects ANOVA. Neither of the two main effects nor the interaction was statistically significant (ps>.50). This result indicates that it is appropriate to treat perceived deviance as an independent variable.

⁵The ambiguity remaining in the questionnaire concerning the target of angry emotions (e.g., self-directed hostility vs. hostility directed toward others) allows us to envisage a possible dissociation in the hostility responses anticipated by the socially controlled participants, which may generate a difference in the intensity of the emotional reactions experienced. Consequently, this dissociation was controlled by the specification of the target of angry emotions when it was necessary.