When Rejection by One Fosters Aggression Against Many: Multiple-Victim Aggression as a Consequence of Social Rejection and Perceived Groupness.

Two experiments examined the hypothesis that social rejection and perceived groupness function together to produce multiple-victim incidents of aggression. When a rejecter's group membership is salient during an act of rejection, the rejectee ostensibly associates the rejecter's group with rejection and retaliates against the group. Both experiments manipulated whether an aggregate of three persons appeared as separate individuals or members of an entity-like group and whether one of those persons rejected the participant.

Us without them: evidence for an intragroup origin of positive in-group regard.

Four experiments examined whether group formation and positive in-group regard require interaggregate comparison as the in-group-requires-an-out-group assumption of the metacontrast principle implies. The authors fostered novel social aggregates with or without a contrasting aggregate with which members could compare and varied intra-aggregate factors (interaction or interdependence). Regardless of whether interaggregate comparison was feasible, the intra-aggregate factors increased the perceived entitativity of the aggregate and positive regard toward the aggregate (i.

The "I," the "we," and the "when": a meta-analysis of motivational primacy in self-definition.

What is the primary motivational basis of self-definition? The authors meta-analytically assessed 3 hypotheses: (a) The individual self is motivationally primary, (b) the collective self is motivationally primary, and (c) neither self is inherently primary; instead, motivational primacy depends on which self becomes accessible through contextual features. Results identified the individual self as the primary motivational basis of self-definition. People react more strongly to threat and enhancement of the individual than the collective self.