Department of Management and Organisations, University of Western Australia Business School, Crawley, Western Australia, Australia.
Department of Management and Technology, Bocconi University, Milan, Lombardy, Italy.
PLoS One. 2018 May 24;13(5):e0197848. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0197848. eCollection 2018.
The outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election was a big surprise to many, as the majority of polls had predicted the opposite outcome. In this two-stage cross-sectional study, we focus on how Democrats and Republicans reacted to this electoral surprise and how these reactions might have influenced the way they allocated resources to each other in small groups. We find that, before the election, Republicans showed greater in-group favoritism than Democrats, who treated others equally, regardless of their political affiliation. We then show that Democrats experienced the election outcome as an ego shock and, in the week following the election, reported significantly higher levels of negative emotions and lower levels of self-esteem than Republicans. These reactions then predicted how individuals' decided to allocate resources to others: after the election, Republicans no longer showed in-group favoritism, while Democrats showed out-group derogation. We find these decisions when the tables were turned can be partially explained by differences in participants' state self-esteem.
2016 年美国总统大选的结果令许多人大为惊讶，因为大多数民调都预测了相反的结果。在这项两阶段的横断面研究中，我们关注的是民主党人和共和党人对这一选举意外的反应，以及这些反应如何影响他们在小团体中相互分配资源的方式。我们发现，在选举前，共和党人比民主党人表现出更强的内群体偏爱，而民主党人则平等对待他人，无论他们的政治派别如何。然后我们表明，民主党人将选举结果视为自我冲击，在选举后的一周内，他们报告的负面情绪显著高于共和党人，自尊心也低于共和党人。这些反应继而预测了个人决定如何向他人分配资源：选举后，共和党人不再表现出内群体偏爱，而民主党人则表现出对外群体的贬低。我们发现，当情况发生变化时，这些决定部分可以用参与者的状态自尊心的差异来解释。
