Vicarious Retribution And The Impact Factors

As one of the major social issue, intergroup conflict has been endangering social harmony and stability. Through making a comprehensive view of the mass incidents both from domestic and abroad, a lot of massive intergroup conflicts are caused by interpersonal contradiction merely. How do the conflicts between two individuals spread to a multitude of others? Why do the group members, who aren’t directly related to the original attack, play an active role in the follow-up retaliatory violence? The concept of vicarious retribution provides a new research perspective to explain intergroup conflict.Based on Social Identity Theory, Intergroup Emotion Theory, Deterrence Theory and the related literatures, the present research conducted two experiments to explore the influences and mechanism of vicarious retribution. Under the background of dormitory interpersonal relationships, experiment 1 including 87 undergraduate students, manipulated outgroup entitativity to test the model of vicarious retribution with the use of path analysis. Given the results in experiment 1, the present research further investigated the relationship between environment and intergroup retribution by introducing the notion of territoriality. In experiment 2,117 baseball and softball players were recruited. The experiment manipulated territoriality and outgroup entitativity to test the influences of territoriality and perception of outgroup entitativity on intention of verbal attacks and physical attacks after provocation. The results of the present dissertation showed as following:(1) Ingroup identification has significantly positively predictive effect on vicarious retribution; group anger partially mediates the relationship of ingroup identification and vicarious retribution.(2) Perception of outgroup entitativity is a significantly negative predictors of vicarious retribution; group anger plays as a wholly mediating role in the relationship between outgroup entitativity and vicarious retribution.(3) Territoriality has significantly positively predictive effect on vicarious retribution; ingroup members are more inclined to punish outgroup, when the original attack took place in homeground.(4) A significant interaction effect between ingroup identification and outgroup entitativity exists:When the outgroup which the provocateur belonged to has a low entitativity, the ingroup members with higher identification are more likely to engage in vicarious retribution.At the last, the research provides a few suggestions and countermeasures for prevention and containment of intergroup conflict, in order to promote social harmony.