Threat and reactions to violated expectations in groups: Adding control to the equation

ABSTRACT

Group members frequently face violations of group-based expectations by in- and outgroup members’ behaviour. Responses to such violations include confronting the violators and escaping from the group. The current article presents a novel, integrative model explaining how and why violations of group-based expectations elicit these reactions. We argue that group members experience violations of expectations as threats to their social selves, which motivates them to react at all. Crucially adding to extant theorising, we argue that how group members react depends on their perceived control, a largely overlooked factor thus far. Herein, we synthesise our model’s empirical basis, which spans studies on different violations (violations of ingroup norms, norms for cooperation, and expectations based on political ideology) and different group contexts (e.g., attitude-based lab groups, learning groups, Facebook groups). Moreover, we discuss boundary conditions for the model’s applicability and its potential for integration with classic research on social identity management.

KEYWORDS:

• Threat
• control
• expectancy violations
• confrontation
• escape

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Edit Gedeon, Eva Jonas, Adrian Lüders, Annika Scholl, and numerous student assistants who have been involved in the research program summarized here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article, as no new data were collected or analysed for its creation. Links to the majority of the data discussed in depth can be found in the respective articles.

Notes

¹ We use the term “confrontational responses” instead of “social control responses” to clearly differentiate reactions and their predictors in our model.

² Please note that these propositions are abstract representations of the hypotheses we tested in our studies, as the model described herein was developed based on our research program.

³ Acceptance of the behaviour did not have an effect in the present study.

⁴ A second a experimental factor – the professor’s effectiveness – only moderated the effect of our violation manipulation on communication intentions.

⁵ Informing participants that others had opposed this post (vs not informing them about the content of others’ replies) did not moderate the reported findings.

⁶ Team choice did not moderate the effects of the Violation x Affirmation interaction.

Additional information

Funding

Writing of this article was supported by the Ministry Of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg through a grant awarded to the first author.