Zachary K Rothschild

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• Ph.D., Social Psychology
• Professor (Associate) at Bowdoin College

Why do people express moral outrage? While this sentiment often stems from a perceived violation of some moral principle, we test the counter-intuitive possibility that moral outrage at third-party transgressions is sometimes a means of reducing guilt over one’s own moral failings and restoring a moral identity. We tested this guilt-driven account...

While bystanders' outrage over moral transgressions may represent a genuine desire to restore justice, such expressions can also be self-serving—alleviating guilt and bolstering one's moral status. Four studies examined whether individual differences in observer justice sensitivity (JSO) moderate the degree to which outrage at third-party harm-doin...

Contemporary U.S. politics is characterized by polarization and interpartisan antipathy. This is accompanied by a media landscape saturated with coverage of political scandals. Applying a social identity perspective, we examined whether exposure to scandals that threaten partisan's moral group image (i.e., in‐party scandals), may motivate defensive...

Individuals are frequently exposed to media describing salient moral violations, often eliciting negative reactions. Three studies examined whether the outrage engendered by such news may serve as a source of personal meaning for justice sensitive individuals. Using an experience sampling method, Study 1 found that among high (but not low) justice...

Research in Terror Management Theory finds that close interpersonal relationships (e.g., parents, romantic partners) mitigate threat reactions to reminders of mortality. Parasocial relationships (imagined relationships with media personalities) afford many of the same benefits as interpersonal relationships. Do these benefits extend to mortality co...

Clinical and personality research consistently demonstrates that people can form unhealthy and problematic attachments to material possessions. To better understand this tendency, the current paper extends past research demonstrating that anxieties about other people motivate these attachments. These findings suggest that although object attachment...

Introduction: Drawing on existential psychology we examine the possibility that specific phobias can serve a psychological function. Specifically, we propose that phobic objects allow individuals to focalize anxieties about haphazard existential threats into a more manageable form, reducing perceptions of risk and bolstering control. Method: We tes...

Separate lines of research show that individuals: (a) understand immorality metaphorically as physical contamination; (b) project undesirable self-attributes onto others; and (c) view punishment as eliminating a transgressor’s immorality. Integrating these findings, we hypothesized that individuals project guilt over their own immorality—represente...

How do people evaluate candidate solutions to abstract problems that are difficult to grasp? According to conceptual metaphor theory, people can conceptualize abstract ideas in terms of well-known bodily states, even if they are not currently experiencing those bodily states. Extending this perspective, we test a novel metaphoric fit hypothesis con...

Previous research shows that people objectify strangers when led to feel uncertain about their ability to positively relate to those targets-termed subjectivity uncertainty. The current research goes further to examine whether, in the context of close relationships, subjectivity uncertainty causes people to adopt simplified perceptions of a relatio...

People frequently encounter messages framing abstract sociopolitical issues (e.g., drug law enforcement) metaphorically in terms of superficially unrelated, more concrete concepts (e.g., military combat). These metaphoric framings are not mere figures of speech; instead, they prompt observers to interpret the target issue using their knowledge of t...

Integrating research on intergroup emotions and scapegoating, we propose that moral outrage toward an outgroup perceived to be unjustly harming another outgroup can represent a motivated displacement of blame that reduces collective guilt over ingroup harm-doing. We tested this hypothesis by manipulating the purported cause of working-class America...

Collective guilt from harm one's group has caused an out‐group is often undermined because people minimize or legitimize the harm done (i.e., they generate exonerating cognitions). When a group action has harmed both the in‐group and an out‐group, focusing people on “self‐harm”—ways in which the in‐group has harmed itself—may elicit more collective...

Integrating research on intergroup emotions and scapegoating, we propose that moral outrage toward an outgroup perceived to be unjustly harming another outgroup can represent a motivated displacement of blame that reduces collective guilt over ingroup harm-doing. We tested this hypothesis by manipulating the purported cause of working-class America...

Political enemyship is common and diverse, ranging from the scapegoating of minority parties by dominant ones to conspiracy theories about the alleged power of one individual to control wide swaths of society. Many social scientists have argued that enemy figures and out-groups play an essential role in the construction and defense of political ide...

People need to understand why an instance of suffering occurred and what purpose it might have. One widespread account of suffering is a repressive suffering construal (RSC): interpreting suffering as occurring because people deviate from social norms and as having the purpose of reinforcing the social order. Based on the theorizing of Emile Durkhe...

In this chapter, the authors explain how the search for meaning can sometimes foster scapegoating and the creation of enemies. They propose that having enemies and scapegoats allows people to attribute negative outcomes to a comprehensible and controllable source, thus adding to the sense that life is meaningful. The authors review recent studies s...

The authors present a model that specifies 2 psychological motives underlying scapegoating, defined as attributing inordinate blame for a negative outcome to a target individual or group, (a) maintaining perceived personal moral value by minimizing feelings of guilt over one's responsibility for a negative outcome and (b) maintaining perceived pers...

Why do people sometimes view others as objects rather than complete persons? We propose that when peo-ple desire successful interactions with others, yet feel uncertain about their ability to navigate others' subjec-tivity, they downplay others' subjective attributes, focusing instead on their concrete attributes. This account suggests that objecti...

Attachment theory posits that close interpersonal relationships provide people with psychological security across the lifespan. Research shows that when people perceive that close others are unreliable, they may seek alternative, non-social sources of security (e.g., deities). Building on this work, the authors hypothesized that attachment to objec...

Accusations of unjust harm doing by the ingroup threaten the group's moral identity. One strategy for restoring ingroup moral identity after such a threat is competitive victimhood: claiming the ingroup has suffered compared with the harmed outgroup. Men accused of harming women were more likely to claim that men are discriminated against compared...

In this chapter, we introduce a novel account that draws on insights from existential psychology to inform our understanding of the uncertainty-extremism relation in two ways. First, we propose that existential uncertainty—uncertainty about how, and whether it is possible, to achieve a significant life—is particularly threatening because certain be...

TheoryResearchFetishism and ExtremismFuture DirectionsReferences

What combination of dispositional and situational factors leads people to represent their personal value in quantitative terms (e.g., salary) rather than qualitative terms (e.g., virtue)? Integrating research on quantitative information seeking, dispositional epistemic motivation, and learned helplessness, the current article hypothesized that indi...

Consistent with conceptual metaphor theory's claim that metaphors operate at a conceptual, and not just linguistic, level, prior research shows that priming perceptions related to concrete concepts influences perceptions related to dissimilar, more abstract concepts in metaphor-consistent ways. However, the theory's claim that metaphors function to...

Drawing on conceptual metaphor perspectives and embodied cognition theories, we proposed that the intrinsic self-concept–who people think they truly are–is represented metaphorically as a physical entity, and that expressions of the intrinsic self-concept are therefore conceptualized in terms of entity activity. Using an empirical strategy for expe...

From a terror management theory (TMT) perspective, religion serves to manage the potential terror engendered by the uniquely human awareness of death by affording a sense of psychological security and hope of immortality. Although secular beliefs can also serve a terror management function, religious beliefs are particularly well suited to mitigate...

Perceiving oneself as having powerful enemies, although superficially disagreeable, may serve an important psychological function. On the basis of E. Becker's (1969) existential theorizing, the authors argue that people attribute exaggerated influence to enemies as a means of compensating for perceptions of reduced control over their environment. I...

This article analyzes inter-group conflict through the lens of Terror Management Theory and explains how belief systems can breed animosity and hostility towards those who do not share one’s beliefs. Research provides support converging with historical analyses suggesting that many of the same psychological mechanisms that lead terrorists to take a...

Although it has often been said that violence begets violence, policy decisions rarely seem to reflect this ancient wisdom. Today's turbulent world of terrorism and counter-terrorism is certainly no exception, with violence being the tool of choice for all sides, and seemingly little regard for human life. This chapter discusses the psychological p...

Religious fundamentalism has been shown to be associated with higher levels of prejudice, ethnocentrism, and militarism, in spite of the compassionate values promoted by the religious faiths that most fundamentalists believe in. Based on terror management theory, we hypothesized that priming these compassionate values would encourage a shift toward...

Academic tests and their conditions of administration are culturally loaded when they make salient culturally specific knowledge structures in addition to measuring the intended cognitive ability. Cultural loading demonstrably influences test performance, but why? Drawing on converging perspectives on the psychological function of culture, this art...

Terror management theory (TMT) is used to explore psychological forces that act to promote or discourage support for terrorism and violent counterterrorist policies. According to TMT, domination, humiliation, and perceived injustice threaten the self-esteem and cultural worldviews that protect people from death-related anxiety; the result may be ho...