Phd Thesis: " How outraged reactions to intragroup threat affect group membership preference"
Authors: Mazzuca Silvia 
Published: July 2018

Whether we think about large-scale social groups (e.g. associations, clubs, and nations) or small-scale interpersonal group (e.g. close relationships, colleagues, and group of friends), the life cycle of any social group develops along a continuum that goes from its formation to its dissolution. Social psychology has concentrated almost exclusively on the processes that allow groups achieving oneness and uniformity, such as social identity and categorization process, and has given little attention to the phenomenon of group dissolution, the schism. Although the complexity of this process may have limited the research, schism is not a so rare phenomenon and the recent international events of Grexit, Brexit, and the separatism of Cataluña, have shown that it critically affects the society as a whole. Differently from the individual exit, the schism involves that individuals act as a (sub-) group, and as such it implies that an intragroup situation (the original group) become an intergroup situation (subgroups) where conflicts over essential aspects of the group identity stimulate a division between “us” and “them”. Although the social psychological model of schism in groups proposed by Sani (2005) has highlighted some necessary conditions of a schism, the link between the cause and the decision to leave a group is unclear as one cause may facilitate leaving for one member and not for another. Three studies examined the effect of (a) moral outrage and of (b) psychological disengagement on schismatic intention and identified the conditions under which these reactions lead minority group members to give up with their membership in a majority group. In the first two studies, a moderated mediational model of moral outrage was tested in the relationship between moral threat and intention to leave. In the third study, a mediational model of disengagement in the relationship between moral outrage and leaving intention was tested. Study 1 analysed the real-life event of Brexit (it was run few days before the referendum), and found moral outrage about maintain the membership in the EU, mediating the relationship between a moral threat (caused by PM, Cameron, defending EU position) and the intention to leave the EU. Study 2 (run nine months after the referendum) accounted for the change in leadership prototypicality after the Brexit results (Cameron resigned, and May become the new Prime Minister of UK) and confirmed the mediating role of outrage about staying in EU, and the decision to leave the EU. These two studies provided an initial evidence for the motivating role of moral outrage in pushing forward the defence of the minority identity (UK), at the expense of the membership in a superordinate identity (EU). Study 3, lend further support to the causal role of moral outrage on exit processes, by pointing to psychological disengagement as a mediator of such relationship. By manipulating two discrete components of moral outrage (anger and contempt were considered, because of their different social functions; see e.g. Roseman &amp; Fisher, 2007), disengagement was found to differently predict the collective actions of voice and exit. In particular, results showed that the contempt component of outrage, rather than the anger component, triggered individual’s intention to give up with their membership in the majority group, and this relationship was fully mediated by psychologically disengagement. Directions for future research and implementations of the findings of the current research are discussed according to schism theory and intergroup conflict processes.