Group reaction to defection: The impact of shared reality

Little attention has been devoted to group members' reactions to people who defect from their group. This article reports three studies based on the assumption that evaluations of defectors vary inversely with the threat they pose to other members' sense of shared reality. Results indicated, as predicted, that (1) defectors who joined a similar group were evaluated more negatively than those who joined a dissimilar group; (2) group members who had a stronger sense of shared reality reacted less negatively to defectors than did members who had a weaker sense of shared reality; and (3) group members who were higher in Need for Cognitive Closure (NCC) reacted more negatively to defectors than did members who were lower in NCC when closure was threatened by the absence of a strong sense of shared reality. Theoretical implications of the findings and directions for future research were discussed.