title: Without mercy: the immediate impact of group size on lynch mob atrocity.
abstract: Two independent research traditions have focused on social contributions to lynching. The sociological power threat hypothesis has argued that lynching atrocity will increase as a function of the relative number of African Americans. The psychological self-attention theory has argued that lynching atrocity will increase as a function of the relative number of mob members. Two series of analyses (one using newspaper reports and the second using photographic records) using different and nonoverlapping samples of lynching events rendered a consistent pattern of results: Lynch mob atrocity did not increase as a function of the relative numbers of African Americans in the county population but it did increase as a function of the relative numbers of mob members in the lynch mob. Discussion considers the implications of these results.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. ti12@kent.ac.uk
authors.forename: Tirza
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Leader
authors.forename: Brian
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Mullen
authors.forename: Dominic
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Abrams
mesh_terms: D001741:Black or African American; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006708:Homicide / Q000266:history / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008399:Mass Behavior; D009524:Newspapers as Topic; D010781:Photography; D011582:Psychological Theory; D012106:Research; D014481:United States