Re‐Socialise or Punish? Reactions Toward Ingroup Deviants as a Function of Types of Deviance

ABSTRACT People employ various tactics to realign deviant members to their ingroup's norms. While sometimes people react to deviance by re‐teaching ingroup norms, other situations call for people to punish the deviant. However, no researchers have dissected what types of ingroup deviations produce different realignment tactics. We examined whether incompetent, unsociable and immoral deviants elicited different realignment tactics. Across four studies ( N Total = 1211), we manipulated the type of deviance (incompetent, unsociable, immoral) before measuring people's support of realignment tactics (re‐socialisation, interpersonal punishment, institutional punishment). Four experiments consistently showed that people had more support for interpersonally and institutionally punishing immoral ingroup deviants compared to unsociable deviants. Studies 2, 3 and 4 congruently revealed that people supported re‐socialising the incompetent deviant more than the unsociable deviant. Moreover, results showed that ingroup deviants' membership status (Study 3) and whether the organisation where the deviants work prioritises sociability or competence (Study 4) did not moderate these effects. These findings suggest that group members implement different realignment tactics based on the type of deviance committed.