The inner world of rejection: effects of social exclusion on emotion, cognition, and self-regulation

By expanding dissonance theory to include collectively shared conceptions of self, this chapter predicts that dissonance can be experienced on behalf of other people that is, and it can be experienced vicariously. Arousal caused by uncertainty about the outcomes of one's own behavior is aversive. The chapter conducts four studies that explored the vicarious dissonance concept: Its goal is to establish the conditions that simulate the scenario described in the chapter. The chapter explores the position that group identification expands the social self and that the occurrence of vicarious dissonance depends on this expanded sense of self. In the research described in the chapter, attitude change by vicarious dissonance was not related either to attitude similarity or to liking for the speaker, two common markers of interpersonal closeness. The chapter develops support for the proposition that the fusing of the individual self with one's social group causes an individual to experience what other members of the group are experiencing