“Why would you do that?!" Altruistic Aggressive Responses to an Unfamiliar Peer’s Rejection

• In Event: 3-048 - Schadenfreude, Revenge and Forgiveness: How Teens React to Others' Misfortunes and Transgressions

Integrative Statement

Adolescence is a particularly important time to study how youth respond to peers who are rejecting or aggressive toward others because how youth respond to these behaviors may influence the peer culture around bullying and future aggressive behavior in the peer group (e.g., (Salmivalli et al., 1996; Espelage, 2002). One defending behavior that youth may enact when responding to the aggression of their peers towards others is to aggress against the transgressor themselves. Altruistic retaliation (also referred to as altruistic punishment) is the action of punishing someone who has committed a violation against another person or a stranger. Brain imaging research indicates that reward centers in the brain are activated when individuals punish or aggress against a person they believed has harmed someone else (e.g., Strobel et al., 2011). However, individual differences and situational factors that may influence whether an adolescent altruistically retaliates against another person have yet to be explored in-depth. The current study investigated how adolescents’ trait and situational empathy and their experiences with a similar transgression predicted their aggression toward others whom they watched reject an unfamiliar peer. It was hypothesized that both trait and situational empathy would predict more aggression towards the observed rejecters. We also hypothesized that experiencing peer rejection, both chronically and in vivo immediately before, would predict more aggression toward the observed rejecters of an unfamiliar peer.
Participants were 101 adolescents (50 male; Mage= 12.34). Participants completed measures of trait empathy (α’s > .75) and reported on their experiences with chronic peer rejection (α = .93). They were randomly assigned to either be accepted or rejected in a game of Cyberball. Adolescents then watched a video of a sex- and race-matched peer being rejected playing Cyberball. After watching the video, adolescents reported their situational empathy (α’s > .60) for the rejected peer, reported on their identification with the rejected peer, and they had the opportunity to send messages to the rejecters. Messages to the rejecters were coded for aggressive content (interrater reliability ICC = .79).
Adolescents’ trait empathy and their own experience of rejection or acceptance in the Cyberball game were not related to aggressive behavior toward the rejecters. However, analyses also revealed that adolescents’ self-reported chronic peer rejection, their situational empathy for the rejected peer, and their identification with the rejected peer were positively associated with aggressive behavior toward the rejecters. Furthermore, mediational analyses using the PROCESS macro in SPSS (Hayes, 2017) found that identification with the rejected peer partially mediated the effect of the rejection experience on aggressive behavior towards the rejecters (R2 = .14, indirect effect = .15, p < .05). Situational empathy also mediated the relationship between chronic rejection and aggressive behavior towards the rejecters (R2 = .10, indirect effect = .08, p < .05).
Altogether, results suggest that processes of empathy and identification are important for understanding when youth may decide to altruistically retaliate against peers who have been hostile or rejecting to others. Discussion will focus on the influence empathy and identification have on defending behaviors generally.

Authors

• Carolyn E. Gibson, Drury University
  Presenting Author

• Kristina McDonald, University of Alabama
  Non-Presenting Author