Group members’ reactions toward defection: the role of shared reality and epistemic motivation.

Lucia Mannetti*, Antonio Pierro*, Eraldo De Grada*, John Levine**, & Arie Kruglanski***
*University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy
**University of Pittsburgh, USA
***University of Maryland, USA

The present studies, that were stimulated by the theoretical analysis of group reactions to loyalty and disloyalty (Levine & Moreland, 2002), investigated how groups respond to an interesting form of disloyalty, namely defection, which involves leaving one’s current group to join another group. Our three studies (having as participants members of Young Catholic Association, study 1; players of Juvenile Volleyball teams, study 2; and members of Scout groups, study 3) focus on the threat that defectors pose to the group’s sense of shared reality. From this perspective, defectors elicit negative reactions because they jeopardize the group’s sense of shared reality. If this is true, the strength of the group’s negative reaction to defectors should vary positively with the defectors’ threat to shared reality. Furthermore, members with higher Need for Cognitive Closure should perceive more strongly and negatively the threat to shared reality since defection, whatever the defector’s motives represents a change of the status quo and, for high NCC people, a potential threat to order and predictability of the world. Results of all the studies show that: a) high confidence in shared reality appears to reduce the threatening potential of defection episodes; b) high Need for closure appears to induce a more negative reaction toward defection; and c) the relationship between NCC and negative reaction toward defection is moderated by confidence in shared reality: when such a confidence is low high NCC members react more negatively to defection.