Effects Of Perceived Injustice On Different Forms Of Collective Action

The past three decades have brought many changes to China and the country has undergone many social and economic reforms.For example,China has opened up to the outside world and has transitioned from a planned economy to a market economy.These changes have been associated with great increases in income and living standards.Despite these advances,the gap between the rich and the poor has widened over the last decades and there is growing strong sense of injustice and public dissatisfaction.Especially in recent years,some extreme group members may even produce resentment to the officials and the rich.Then the negative emotion would enable people participate in the conflicts of non-direct benefit.The conflicts of non-direct benefit are a special form of collective action in our country,which is diverse,destructive and affected.Also,there has been a sharp rise in the number of collective action events in China.In addition,the scale of collective action events has expanded.Thus,exploring the potential psychological mechanism of the conflicts of non-direct benefit is extremely urgent.Research has shown that there are differences for influencing mechanism of collective action in terms of their different types or developmental stages.Although foreign researchers have discussed the mechanism of different types of collective action,the study was conducted under the background of foreign.So whether the influence mechanism applies collective action under the background of our society remains to be further explored.And previous studies mainly investigated the anger of the emotion of collective action,but anger does not explain the radical collective action.Based on the previous study,we distinguished three different types of collective action(i.e.,soft,hard and radical collective action)which represented the forms of collective action of our country,using compiled material describing a real collective action occurred in China.Importantly,resentment was included in the dual-pathway model of collective action.Thus,we examine the influence of the perceived injustice,group-based anger,resentment,and group efficacy on different forms of collective action.The main aim of this present research is to explore the potential psychological mechanism of different types of collective action in the context of China and have some practical implications for the mass incidents managing.This research adopted the experimental and questionnaire investigation method,using a total of 670 college students and the public as subjects with three studies.The stimulus materialof experimental group and control group are different.After read a real material,participants completed the measurement of perceived injustice,group-based anger,resentment,and groupbased efficacy collective action intentions and Buss-Perry aggression.On the basis of remaining the neutral adaptation,this study choose chose three real the conflicts of non-direct benefit,and the compiled questionnaire according to the event.Main conclusions are as follows:(1)Perceived justice positively predicted soft and hard collective action intention.(2)Group-based anger positively predicted soft and hard collective action intention,and resentment positively predicted hard and radical collective action intention.(3)Group efficacy predicted soft collective action intention,hard collective action intention and radical collective action intention.(4)Perceived justice indirectly predicted soft collective action intention via group-anger.(5)Perceived justice indirectly predicted hard collective action intention via resentment.