Group Membership and Deviance Punishment

Abstract

Deviance Punishment is an important issue for social-psychological research. Group members tend to punish deviance through rejection, ostracism and – more commonly – negative judgments. Subjective Group Dynamics proposes to account for social judgement patterns of deviant and conformist individuals. Relying on a group identity management perspective, one of the model’s core predictions is that the judgment of a deviant target depends on group membership. More specifically, the model predicts that deviant ingroup members should be judged more negatively than outgroup ones. Although this effect has been repeatedly observed over the past decades, there is a current lack of sufficiently powered studies in the literature. For the first time, we conducted tests of Subjective Group Dynamics in France and the US to investigate whether ingroup deviants were judged more harshly than outgroup ones. Across six experiments and an internal mini meta-analysis, we observed no substantial difference in judgment between ingroup and outgroup deviant targets, d = -0.01, 95% CI[-0.07, 0.06]. The findings’ implications for deviance management research are discussed.

Morality's role in the Black Sheep Effect: When and why ingroup members are judged more harshly than outgroup members for the same transgression

“…Bonetto et al. (2023), in contrast, measured both moral judgements and non‐moral judgements, including warmth, competence, hostility and blame. It is possible that the null findings obtained by Bonetto et al.…”

“…Perhaps due to this lack of clarity, some recent work on subjective group dynamics by Bonetto et al (2023) has failed to find evidence for the Black Sheep Effect. On closer reading, however, our work delves into the effect in two important ways that Bonetto et al did not.…”

“…This is because morality acts as a social agent that binds group members together, and threats to moral cohesion are more alarming than non-moral threats. Bonetto et al (2023), in contrast, measured both moral judgements and non-moral judgements, including warmth, competence, hostility and blame. It is possible that the null findings obtained by Bonetto et al are at least partially driven by their measurements of non-moral judgements.…”