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Implicit aggression following exposure to people with physical disabilities: The costs of inhibiting self-protective processes

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Abstract

Previous studies indicate that death reminders elicit prosocial behavior, but also an urge to distance from physical disabilities. Here, we examine whether mortality salience will increase implicit aggression when one is explicitly requested to help a person with physical disability. This implicit negative response may address the need for self-protection when no other means are available. Participants were randomly assigned to a mortality salience or pain condition, were exposed to a veteran with a physical or emotional disability, and were requested or not to help him. Then, they performed a lexical decision task tapping accessibility of aggression-related cognitions. Mortality-salience participants who were exposed to a veteran with physical disability and were compelled to help showed higher accessibility of aggression-related thoughts than participants in other conditions. Findings support the Self-Protective Altruism hypothesis (Hirschberger in Soc Pers Psychol Compass 7:128–140, 2013), implying that sometimes prosocial behavior can involve implicit antisocial thoughts.

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Data availability

The data for the research presented here, and some additional analyses of the pretest data, are shared online on Mendeley Data. All other materials and procedures are available upon request.

Notes

  1. Seven additional participants were run in the study but their data was excluded from the analyses as they had over 10% error rate or over 20% reaction times that exceeded 3 SDs from the mean on the lexical decision task. All the other participants were included in the statistical analyses. Inclusion of the seven excluded participants did not change the findings in the Results section.

  2. We report here all the manipulations we did in the study and all the measures we collected.

  3. Pearson correlations between the 11 variables collected in the pre-test are presented in the supplementary materials.

  4. Two independent judges (Clinical Psychology graduate students) read the letters written by participants to the injured veteran in the help-request condition and rated the extent to which expressions of sorrow, compassion, understanding, anger, criticism, desire to personally meet the veteran, and desire to help and support him appear in the short letter. Ratings were done on a 5-point scale, ranging from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very much) and inter-rater αs ranged from .83 to .90. ANOVAs performed on each of these ratings revealed no significant main effect or interactions for mortality salience and type of injury, all Fs < 1.5, all ps > .10, all η2 < .02.

  5. Two other independent judges (Psychology undergraduates) read the evaluations written by participants in the neutral condition and rated the positivity of the evaluation on a 5-point scale, ranging from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very much). Inter-rater α for this rating was .87. The ANOVA performed on this rating revealed no significant main effect or interactions for mortality salience and type of injury, all Fs < 1, all ps > .10, all η2 < .01.

  6. Three-way ANOVAs conducted on RTs for non-words, neutral words, and aggression-unrelated negative words revealed that all the main effects and interactions were not significant, all Fs < 1.49, all ps > .22, all η2 < .01.

  7. The introduction of gender as an additional factor in the ANOVAs did not change the significance of the reported effects. Moreover, the main effect for gender and its interactions with the other independent variables were not significant.

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Correspondence to Gilad Hirschberger.

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Talmor, D., Hirschberger, G., Seeman, S. et al. Implicit aggression following exposure to people with physical disabilities: The costs of inhibiting self-protective processes. Motiv Emot 43, 554–562 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-019-09757-x

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