TY  - JOUR
U1  - Wissenschaftlicher Artikel
A1  - Berendt, Johannes
A1  - van Leeuwen, Esther
A1  - Uhrich, Sebastian
T1  - Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live Without Them: The Ambivalent Effects of Existential Outgroup Threat on Helping Behavior
JF  - Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
N2  - Social comparison theories suggest that ingroups are strengthened whenever important outgroups are weakened (e.g., by losing status or power). It follows that ingroups have little reason to help outgroups facing an existential threat. We challenge this notion by showing that ingroups can also be weakened when relevant comparison outgroups are weakened, which can motivate ingroups to strategically offer help to ensure the outgroups' survival as a highly relevant comparison target. In three preregistered studies, we showed that an existential threat to an outgroup with high (vs. low) identity relevance affected strategic outgroup helping via two opposing mechanisms. The potential demise of a highly relevant outgroup increased participants’ perceptions of ingroup identity threat, which was positively related to helping. At the same time, the outgroup’s misery evoked schadenfreude, which was negatively related to helping. Our research exemplifies a group's secret desire for strong outgroups by underlining their importance for identity formation.
KW  - intergroup processes
KW  - Eigengruppe
KW  - Fremdgruppe
KW  - Hilfeleistung
KW  - Identitätsentwicklung
KW  - strategic outgroup help
KW  - identity threat
KW  - social comparison
KW  - social identity
Y1  - 2023
UN  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:960-opus4-24985
U6  - https://doi.org/10.25968/opus-2498
DO  - https://doi.org/10.25968/opus-2498
PB  - SAGE
ER  -