PUNISHING AN “UNFAIR” LEADER: PEOPLE AS PRAGMATIC POLITICIANS WITH IN-GROUP BUT FAIR-BUT-BIASED PROSECUTORS WITH OUT-GROUP

People perceive others as belonging to their own category (in-group, us) or a different category (out-group, them), and treat the in-group members more favourably than the out-group ones. This in-group bias is at odds with the contemporary demands that people ought to be fair to all. Thus, people may seek a compromise between in-group favouritism and fairness to out-groups. To test the hypotheses that in-group bias is a general norm of intergroup relations but fairness may be pseudo, the authors manipulated procedural (enough vs short notice for feedback on an important decision) and distributive (meritocracy vs in-group favouritism in wages) injustices by a male or female manager of a software company, and took measures of outrage, attribution, attitude, and punishment responses to an erring manager from male and female participants in Singapore (N = 112). As predicted by the social-functionalist model of people as intuitive prosecutors, the four responses to the manager were empirically distinct. Further, the punitive response was higher when there was seeming procedural or distributive injustice than when there was justice by the manager. At the overt level, no interaction between categorisation and injustice in punishment suggested that people were “fair” prosecutors. However, the moderated-mediation analysis of the seemingly nonsignificant interaction disclosed that the intergroup bias in outrage had suppressed, but that in attitude had mediated, the pseudo fairness in punishment. Further, the sequential model in which outrage preceded attitude seemed more plausible than the model in which attitude preceded outrage in leading to punishment. Results portrayed people as pragmatic politicians in defending the erring in-group leader but as prudent prosecutors in denigrating the erring out-group leader. Applied, theoretical, and methodological implications of the findings are discussed.