Citation

Martens A, Kosloff S, Greenberg J, Landau MJ, Schmader T. Person. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 2007; 33(9): 1251-1264.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, University of Canterbury, New Zealand. andy.martens@canterbury.ac.nz

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0146167207303020

PMID

17565050

Abstract

Killing appears to perpetuate itself even in the absence of retaliation. This phenomenon may occur in part as a means to justify prior killing and so ease the threat of prior killing. In addition, this effect should arise particularly when a killer perceives similarity to the victims because similarity should exacerbate threat from killing. To examine these ideas, the authors developed a bug-killing paradigm in which they manipulated the degree of initial bug killing in a "practice task" to observe the effects on subsequent self-paced killing during a timed "extermination task." In Studies 1 and 2, for participants reporting some similarity to bugs, inducing greater initial killing led to more subsequent self-paced killing. In Study 3, after greater initial killing, more subsequent self-paced killing led to more favorable affective change. Implications for understanding lethal human violence are discussed.

Language: en