Extreme reactions to deviance: The impact of crisis contexts and deviant's role

Abstract

During an economic crisis, groups are concerned with managing the consequences of the crisis. Given this concern, the group becomes more reactive and intransigent towards internal threats (e.g., deviance). We propose that, in an economic crisis, the group's members develop a sense of relative deprivation. As such, facing the emergence of an internal threat promotes more extreme, negative, and exclusive attitudes that translate into a higher agreement with punitive measures, especially towards deviants with leadership roles. Therefore, we conducted an experiment (N = 156) that manipulated the salience of the crisis (salience of the economic breakdown vs. control) and the deviant's role in the national group (leader: director; regular member: regular worker in a public organization). Participants stated their feelings of relative deprivation, perceived threat to the ingroup triggered by the deviant, deviant's evaluation, and agreement with reactions to deviance (tolerance, resocialization, soft and severe punishment and recategorization). The results show that when an economic crisis is salient, individuals become more intolerant, less receptive to resocializing deviants, and defend more strongly the recategorization of the deviants in another group. Furthermore, in the face of crises, perceived relative deprivation exacerbated the need to recategorize the deviants in another group, especially leaders. Consequently, this predicted the agreement with the application of punishment actions, especially severe ones. Finally, this research demonstrates that crises drive an internal reconfiguration of the group aimed at psychologically excluding the deviants of its category (mainly leaders), seemingly eliciting agreement with more severe punitive actions.