Abstract
Previous research has provided ample evidence that being a victim of ostracism increases the enactment of aggressive behavior; however, it is unclear how emotions may account for the link. In this research, we aimed to address this knowledge gap by investigating whether being ostracized increases malicious envy and whether this emotion accounts for the link between ostracism and direct aggressive tendencies. We conducted two studies to test our prediction that ostracism increases malicious envy, thereby increasing direct aggressive tendencies. In Study 1, participants completed measures to assess their experiences of ostracism, malicious envy, and aggressive tendencies. In Study 2, participants were asked to play an online ball-tossing game, during which those in the ostracism condition were ostracized, whereas participants in the control condition did not experience ostracism. After the game, participants completed measures assessing their malicious envy and aggressive tendencies. The results of both studies consistently showed that ostracized participants reported higher levels of malicious envy and aggressive tendencies than nonostracized participants. Moreover, malicious envy mediated the link between ostracism and aggressive tendencies. In sum, we provided innovative empirical evidence showing how trait-level (Study 1) and state-level (Study 2) malicious envy can predict the direct aggressive tendencies in individuals who suffer from ostracism.
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Notes
We conducted additional analyses for both studies, finding that the interaction effects between gender and ostracism on malicious envy and aggressive tendencies were not statistically significant. Further, the main effects and mediation effects reported in the main text remained significant after controlling for gender. Therefore, our analyses suggest that gender did not qualitatively influence the relationships between ostracism, malicious envy, and aggressive tendencies. The present studies did not intend to examine the effects of gender and we did not make any specific predictions about its roles. For the sake of achieving conciseness and preventing Type-I errors (Simmons et al., 2011), we reported all results in the main text based on the analyses without controlling for gender.
We conducted an additional mediation analysis using the PROCESS Macro 4 to test whether malicious envy, anger, and hostility mediate the effect of ostracism on aggressive tendencies in parallel. Anger and hostility were measured through the Anger and Hostility subscales, respectively, from the Buss–Perry Aggression Questionnaire (short-form; Bryant & Smith, 2001). The results revealed that malicious envy still mediated the effect of ostracism on aggressive tendencies after we controlled for anger and hostility, 95% CI [0.01, 0.10]. In addition, neither anger, 95% CI [−0.002, 0.08], nor hostility, 95% CI [−0.01, 0.11], mediated the ostracism–aggression link.
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This research was supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council’s General Research Fund (18611121) and the Education University of Hong Kong’s Internal Research Grant (RG 85/2018-2019R).
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Poon, KT., To, N., Lo, WY. et al. Green with envy: ostracism increases aggressive tendencies. Curr Psychol 42, 32314–32323 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-04221-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-04221-5