Egoistic and fraternalistic relative deprivation in the prediction of support for political violence and violent intentions

Abstract

Outcomes of a recent meta-analysis highlighted the difference in the contribution of egoistic and fraternalistic relative deprivation to the prediction of support for political violence and violent intentions. However, no explanation for this difference was provided. As processual models of aggression contain the "targeting" phase, in which responsibility for the situation is attributed to someone or something, next to testing the relationship between the two types of relative deprivation and support for political violence and violent intentions (intentions to participate in activities of a violent group) as criteria, we also tested if the degree of blame for inequality attributed to the outgroup moderates these relationships. The analysis was conducted on Croatian student (n = 735) and non-student (n = 144) samples of youth. Fraternalistic relative deprivation consistently exhibited stronger relationships with our criteria than egoistic relative deprivation, which predicted only the support for political violence. Despite the shared variance, we also found arguments in favor of the interaction between fraternalistic relative deprivation and blame attribution in the prediction of violent intentions, but not in the prediction of support for political violence. Altogether, the findings confirm the contribution of fraternalistic relative deprivation and blame attribution to understanding attitudes and intentions behind political violence. Implications for deradicalization programs are briefly discussed.