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Feeling unrestricted by rules: Ostracism promotes aggressive responses
Author(s) -
Poon KaiTak,
Teng Fei
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
aggressive behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.223
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 1098-2337
pISSN - 0096-140X
DOI - 10.1002/ab.21714
Subject(s) - ostracism , aggression , feeling , psychology , social psychology , priming (agriculture) , developmental psychology , botany , germination , biology
The current research consisted of three studies (overall N = 338; 59 men; mean age = 19.98; SD = 1.75), which aimed to examine whether ostracism promotes aggression through enhanced feelings of rule negligence by adopting a multi‐method approach. Participants were undergraduate students in a public university in Hong Kong and they only participated in one of the three studies. The results showed that ostracized participants reported higher levels of rule negligence and aggression than non‐ostracized participants (Studies 1 and 2). Moreover, enhanced feelings of rule negligence significantly mediated the relation between ostracism and aggression (Studies 1 and 2). In addition, priming ostracized people with the importance of following social rules weakened the effect of ostracism on aggression (Study 3). In sum, these findings highlight the critical influence of rule negligence in understanding when and why ostracism promotes aggression and how to diminish such an effect. Implications were discussed.