Shame and the Motivation to Change the Self Lickel, Brian; Kushlev, Kostadin; Savalei, Victoria ...
Emotion (Washington, D.C.),
12/2014, Volume:
14, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
A central question of human psychology is whether and when people change for the better. Although it has long been assumed that emotion plays a central role in self-regulation, the role of specific ...emotions in motivating a desire for self-change has been largely ignored. We report 2 studies examining people's lived experiences of self-conscious emotions, particularly shame, in motivating a desire for self-change. Study 1 revealed that when participants recalled experiences of shame, guilt, or embarrassment, shame-and, to some degree, guilt-predicted a motivation for self-change. Study 2 compared shame, guilt, and regret for events and found that although shame experiences often involved high levels of both regret and guilt, it was feelings of shame that uniquely predicted a desire for self-change, whereas regret predicted an interest in mentally undoing the past and repairing harm done. Implications for motivating behavior change are discussed.
Full text
Available for:
CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ
Social movements often use protests and other collective actions to draw public attention to their cause, yet the psychological reactions to such actions from their targeted audience is not well ...understood. This research investigates uninvolved bystanders’ immediate responses to collective action using a quasi-experimental field study designed around a racial justice protest that took place at a large public university in the United States. We surveyed two student samples exactly one week apart at the same time and location, first in the absence of protest and then again at the time of a racial justice protest (Total N = 240). We found that participants who believed that racism was not a problem on campus had more negative attitudes toward racial justice protests and protesters, as well as lower support for anti-racist efforts on campus on the day of the protest, compared to the day without a protest. These findings provide initial evidence that a protest encounter may trigger a backlash effect amongst those who have the most resistant attitudes toward social change.
Background
Racial justice movements often have a strong presence on college campuses. Since the Black Lives Matter movement emerged in 2013, a series of protests have occurred in universities across the United States to push for fair treatment of racial minorities.
Why was this study done?
Protests typically aim to gain the attention of broader society and mobilize greater support for their cause. We can observe this from the range of tactics and contentious actions that protesters typically undertake to disrupt everyday life. Thus, being confronted by a protest might trigger backlash among some people. We therefore aimed to understand how people react when they directly encountered a protest in their social environment.
What did the researchers do and find?
We surveyed members of a campus community exactly a week before, and during a racial justice protest that occurred at a U.S. university. The research distributed brief anonymous surveys to participants who happened to be at the location of the protest. We found that among people who had relatively weaker perceptions of campus racism, they reported more negative attitudes toward racial justice protests and protesters, as well as less support for anti-racist efforts on campus when they physically encountered a racial justice protest (compared to when they did not encounter a protest).
What do these findings mean?
Although protests are a means toward social and political change, it might trigger immediate backlash among people who do not perceive a strong sense of injustice. By focusing on the attitudes of people who encounter a protest, this study contributes to our understanding of how protests can influence the attitudes of broader society.
We provide a new framework for understanding 1 aspect of aggressive conflict between groups, which we refer to as vicarious retribution. Vicarious retribution occurs when a member of a group commits ...an act of aggression toward the members of an outgroup for an assault or provocation that had no personal consequences for him or her but which did harm afellow ingroup member. Furthermore, retribution is often directed at outgroup members who, themselves, were not the direct causal agents in the original attack against the person's ingroup. Thus, retribution is vicarious in that neither the agent of retaliation nor the target of retribution were directly involved in the original event that precipitated the intergroup conflict. We describe how ingroup identification, outgroup entitativity, and other variables, such as group power, influence vicarious retribution. We conclude by considering a variety of conflict reduction strategies in light of this new theoretical framework.
Reducing meat consumption is a highly effective strategy for living sustainably, yet many consumers do not recognize the effectiveness of this strategy. While this may be due in part to a gap in ...awareness, consumers may be motivated to see changing meat consumption as a relatively ineffective strategy compared to other, more direct strategies. In two studies, participants who were weakly identified as “meat‐eaters” and who were more concerned about the environment were more willing to reduce their meat consumption. However, perceived effectiveness of meat reduction as a mitigation strategy mediated this relationship, suggesting that internal motivations may drive perceptions of effectiveness. Participants in a community sample also reacted negatively to a message about meat's effectiveness, though this reaction was mitigated by environmental concern.
Despite a consensus among climate scientists on the impact of meat consumption on climate change, this has not yet had a significant impact on dietary attitudes and behavior in the broader public. ...Recent efforts to address this have focused on reduction of meat consumption (e.g., flexitarianism, reducetarianism) rather than elimination of meat consumption. This reduction-rather-than-elimination approach may have positive effects on how far messages about meat consumption will spread in a social network, reaching more people with therefore a potentially greater impact. To better understand the potential impact of such message, three studies compared reduction versus vegetarian messages that were provided by a person who reduces their meat consumption versus a vegetarian. Overall, reduction focused messages and messengers result in greater acceptance of the message and higher willingness to share the message with others compared to a strictly vegetarian message/messenger.
A new aspect of intergroup conflict was investigated— vicarious retribution—in which neither the agent of retribution nor the target of retribution are directly involved in the initial intergroup ...provocation. The underlying processes involved in vicarious intergroup retribution were tested correlationally (Study 1) and experimentally (Study 2). Both ingroup identification and outgroup entitativity predict the degree of vicarious retribution. In both studies, there was evidence of motivated cognition, specifically that highly identified individuals perceived the outgroup as higher in entitativity than individuals low in identification. Structural equation modeling demonstrated that part of the effect of identification on retribution against the outgroup was mediated through perceptions of entitativity.
Three studies examined perceptions of the entitativity of groups. In Study 1 (U.S.) and Study 2 (Poland), participants rated a sample of 40 groups on 8 properties of groups (e.g., size, duration, ...group member similarity) and perceived entitativity. Participants also completed a sorting task in which they sorted the groups according to their subjective perceptions of group similarity. Correlational and regression analyses were used to determine the group properties most strongly related to entitativity. Clustering and multidimensional scaling analyses in both studies identified 4 general types of groups (intimacy groups, task groups, social categories, and loose associations). In Study 3, participants rated the properties of groups to which they personally belonged. Study 3 replicated the results of Studies 1 and 2 and demonstrated that participants most strongly valued membership in groups that were perceived as high in entitativity.
Full text
Available for:
CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ
Participants recalled instances when they felt vicariously ashamed or guilty for another’s wrongdoing and rated their appraisals of the event and resulting motivations. The study tested aspects of ...social association that uniquely predict vicarious shame and guilt. Results suggest that the experience of vicarious shame and vicarious guilt are distinguishable. Vicarious guilt was predicted by one’s perceived interdependence with the wrongdoer (e.g. high interpersonal interaction), an appraisal of control over the event, and a motivation to repair the other person’s wrongdoing. Vicarious shame was predicted by the relevance of the event to a shared social identity with the wrongdoer, an appraisal of self-image threat, and a motivation to distance from the event. Implications for intergroup behavior and emotion are discussed.
What impact do advantaged group allies have within social movements? Although solidarity between advantaged and disadvantaged group members is often encouraged to achieve long‐term social change, ...allies run the risk of being ineffective or counterproductive, therefore making it important to shift our focus towards understanding the impact of allies. We propose an integrative theoretical framework describing the positive and negative impact of allies based on their distinct identity‐based needs: advantaged group members’ need for moral acceptance and disadvantaged group members’ need for empowerment and respect. By consolidating extant literature and identifying gaps in prior research, we propose a set of hypotheses concerning (a) tensions that arise within intergroup solidarity efforts for social change between advantaged group allies and disadvantaged group members, and (b) the role of allies in influencing broader public opinion to advance the psychology of social change.
We investigated the relationship between emotions of fear and anger and people’s motivation for intergroup aggression within the context of Serbian—Albanian relations in Serbia (Study 1) and ...Serbian—Bosniak intergroup relations in Bosnia (Study 2). Serbian students in Belgrade and Banja Luka completed a survey that assessed their attitudes towards Albanians or Bosniaks. We found that fear of the outgroup was related to increased motivation for aggression in the context of the ongoing conflict in Serbia, whereas fear was negatively related to aggression in Bosnia, where the conflict had been resolved. The relationships between fear and aggression were significant even after controlling for anger. Furthermore, ingroup affiliation mediated the relationship between fear and aggression in Serbia and between anger and aggression in Bosnia. These findings have implications for conflict resolution efforts in ongoing or intractable conflicts.
PDF
