The Influence Of Social Exclusion Warmth And Competence Cognition On Observers' Acceptance Of Social Exclusion

Social exclusion exists everywhere in our daily life.As a kind of interpersonal interaction to threaten the need for belonging,social exclusion has many negative impacts on cognition,emotion and behavior,it also has the social function of maintaining group rules.There were many researches focus on the reasons and influence of social exclusion,but there were little researches pay attention to the perception of observer during social exclusion.Observers' acceptance of social exclusion is an important part of social exclusion cognition,expressing the identification of observer with social exclusion events that have occurred(Rudert,Sutter,Corrodi,& Greifeneder,2018).The evaluation of social exclusion by observer determines whether they will help the excluded in social exclusion,or they are indifferent or even add fuel to the fire.Previous studies have shown that observers prefer to accept social exclusion while it happened on the people who don't want to help others or unable to finish group task(Wesselmann,2013;Hales,Kassener,Williams,&Graziano,2016).The stereotyped content model mentions the two dimensional combination of warmth and competence will cause others to produce four unique emotions: disgust,envy,pity and admiration.These four types of emotions generated when perceiving the warmth and competence of the excluded may affect the acceptance of social exclusion.Different from the emotions generated in the process of perceptual warmth and competence,schadenfreude is the pleasure produced when watching others' misfortune.Observer believe that the misfortune is a situation that others deserve,which will produce more pleasure of misfortune,schadenfreude further strengthens the observer's rationalization of social exclusion.And this emotion will affect the acceptance of social exclusion.In order to test the content and emotional process of the above observers' cognition of the rationality of social exclusion,this paper uses empirical methods to explore the impact of social exclusion content on the observers' rationalization of social exclusion,and the mediating role of emotions.A two-factor within-subject design was adopted in study 1,one factor is the content of socialcognition,another means whether excluded people is positive or negative.This study find that observers prefer to accept the negative person to be excluded,and they don't want to accept the positive person to be excluded.When the excluded people are positive,observer prefer to competent person to be be excluded rather than warm person.When observers receive the warmth information of excluded person,they may also judge the excluded from the competent dimension,and influence the evaluation of exclusion by observer.A two-factor within-subject design was adopted in study 2,one factor is the warmth of the excluded,the other is competence.This study find that observe tends to accept the exclusion of cold and incompetent excluded most,they accept the exclusion of warm and competent excluded least.The same design as study 2,study 3 use another paradigm to replicate the conclusion in study 2,and also measure the moderation of emotions(admiration,envy,pity,disgust,schadenfreude).We find that the warmth of the excluded can influence the evaluation of observers through schadenfreude.The warmth and competent excluded make observer feel admire,so they can't accept this kind of people to be excluded;the cold and incompetent excluded make observer feel disgust,so they prefer to exclude this kind of person.Based on the above research,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)The content and valence of social exclusion will jointly affect the level of observers' acceptance of social exclusion.Observer prefer to exclusion highly capable individuals rather than low ability individuals;however,under low enthusiasm,There is no difference in the acceptance of incompetent individuals and competent being rejected.(2)Emotions mediate the relationship between social exclusion content and observer'acceptance of social exclusion.Incompetent and cold people increase the acceptance of social exclusion by causing the observer feel disgust.Competent and warm person reduce the acceptance of social exclusion by raising observers' admiration.After watching Cold individuals excluded,observers feel schadenfreude and increase their acceptance of social exclusion.