Just hearing about it makes me feel so humiliated: Emotional and motivational responses to vicarious group-based humiliation

• Autor(a) principal: Vorster, A.
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Dumont, K. B., Waldzus, S.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/22910
• topic: Vicarious humiliation; Anger; Shame; Approach; Avoidance

Witnessing a fellow ingroup member being humiliated might be the most common situation in which intergroup humiliation is experienced. Humiliation on a group level is as complex as humiliation on an interpersonal level because of shared appraisals with other emotions. We propose that witnessing a fellow ingroup member being negatively stereotyped by an outgroup member elicits anger and/or shame insofar as it is appraised as vicariously humiliating leading to anger-related approach and shame-related avoidance. Evidence for this proposition was experimentally assessed in three studies using two intergroup contexts: nationality (Study 1: n = 291) and gender (Study 2: n = 429 females and Study 3: n = 353 males). Across these intergroup contexts, the group-devaluing event emphasizing a negative ingroup stereotype evoked anger-related approach and shame-related avoidance indirectly through vicarious humiliation. We conclude that the accompanying emotions and thus resulting motivations determine whether vicarious humiliation results in intergroup conflict.