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 a fellow 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.

Two studies investigated the roles of entitativity and essentiality in judgments of collective responsibility. Analyses focused on four group types (i.e. intimacy groups, task groups, social categories, and loose associations). Repeated measures analyses revealed that intimacy groups and task groups were rated highest in entitativity while intimacy groups and social categories were rated highest in essentiality. Correlational analyses revealed that entitativity played a more central role in judgments of collective responsibility for all four group types. However, tests of interaction effects revealed that essentiality moderated the effect of entitativity on blame judgments. Implications of the role of collective responsibility in intergroup relations are discussed.keywords collective responsibility, entitativity, essentialism, lay theories, intergroup relations SHOULD parents be held responsible for the bad acts of their children? Were all Germans to blame for the Holocaust? Are all the employees of a company accountable for the criminal acts of a few coworkers? Are all Palestinians to blame for the act of a single suicide bomber? Each of these questions concerns group-based, or collective, responsibility. The formal legal system provides one answer to such questions and, with few exceptions, holds responsible and punishes only the direct causal agents of a bad act. However, a growing body of research indicates that lay people cast a broader net in assigning blame. In many instances, lay people appear to believe that shared group membership with a wrongdoer is a basis for blame.Collective responsibility refers to how perceivers assign blame to individuals who were not direct causal agents of negative events but

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.