Jeroen Vaes

In the current research, we examined the association between perceived economic grievances and both intentions to engage and actual engagement in antilockdown protests during the COVID-19 pandemic in high-income countries. We also investigated whether this direct association would be (a) mediated by social identification with the economically disadvantaged and (b) moderated by fatalistic beliefs about the pandemic. In Study 1, multilevel modelling based on online search data from the US ( N = 505) indicated that weekly fluctuations in searches related to economic grievances predicted the occurrence of antilockdown protests over time. In Studies 2 (Germany; N = 404) and 3 (Italy; N = 1,857), we showed that the link between perceived economic grievances and intentions to engage in antilockdown collective action was significantly mediated by social identification with people who suffered economically from the COVID-19 pandemic. Study 3 replicated the findings of Study 2 and extended it by showing the role of high (vs. low) fatalistic beliefs about the pandemic in moderating the association between perceived economic grievances and antilockdown collective action intentions. We discuss the consequences of unaddressed economic grievances for democratic functioning.

When interpersonal harm is inflicted, victims stop seeing themselves as fully human. The tethered humanity hypothesis proposes that victims restore a full human status when perpetrators undertake attempts at reconciliation and victims manage to reestablish the humanness of their perpetrators. In two studies, we tested this hypothesis and manipulated the perpetrators attempts at apologizing for their misconduct. Participants were either included or socially excluded and received a full or self-exonerating apology or a hostile message when they were excluded. Results indicated that victims dehumanized themselves and their ostracizers when they were socially excluded and managed to regain a full human status and rehumanized their perpetrators when a full apology was uttered. Moreover, regression analyses indicated that different humanness judgments (self, other, and meta-humanness) become tethered only when perpetrators apologized, while forgiving the perpetrator always correlated with the rehumanization of the self regardless of the perpetrator’s apology.