"If Anyone Offends Me, I Will Offend Others"?

The convenience of communication is constantly increased with the rapid development of the mobile.Meanwhile,frictions and conflicts happen more frequently.Offensive situations are unavoidable in daily life.Confronting offensive situation,retaliation is a coping style that has both positive and negative effects.Appropriate retaliation could lower the level of anger and enhance self-esteem.But excessive retaliation could bring irreversible negative effect on oneself,others and society.Therefore,studying the effect of various offensive situations on retaliation can not only enrich the empirical research of retaliation,but also help people strengthen the awareness of offensive situations and evaluate the possible retaliation.This paper contains two studies,aimed at exploring the effect of situational factors on retaliation by setting different offensive situations.Study 1 explores the effect of degree of offense and motives of offense on retaliation,containing one experiment.Using 2(degree of offense high/low)x2(the possibility of intentional offense high/low)between subjects design,with the improved game paradigm(URG paradigm),setting offensive situations with different degrees and different motives,and measuring revenge behavior by deducting the opponent's test fee in the game,it is found that in the case of high degree and intentional offense,the amount of retaliation is the largest.And when the degree of offense is high,the offensive motivation has less effect on the amount of retaliation than when the offense is low.Study 2 explores the effect of state empathy on retaliation in different offensive situations.Study 2 contains two 2x2 between subjects designed experiments.These two experiments study the effect of state empathy and degree of offense,motives of offense on retaliation.Using the Chinese word search task to initiate the state empathy,and setting offensive situations in the same way as Study 1,it is found that the state empathy has a significant effect on retaliation,and has an interaction effect with the degree of offense.When the degree of offense is high,the effect of initiating state empathy is reduced.Based on the two research results,it can be concluded that each situational factor has effect on retaliation,and the factor of degree of offense is the most powerful one,which will interfere with the effect of motive of offense and initiating state empathy on retaliation.In conclusion,degree of damage to the victim's own interests is the most critical factor on deciding whether to retaliate or not.