Apart from the fact that we were interested in the hedonic benefits
of displaced revenge, the present research expands the previous literature on displaced revenge in several important ways. First, in the present set of studies, participants were personally victimized and either
should imagine taking revenge (Studies 1 and 2) or actually took
revenge (Study 3). In contrast, participants in prior research were not
personally involved as victims or avengers, but rather took a thirdparty perspective (e.g., Newheiser et al., 2012).
Second, we go beyond previous conceptualizations of displaced revenge as a form of collective punishment (e.g., Gaertner et al., 2008;
Stenstrom et al., 2008). Importantly, collective sanctions always included the actual transgressor whereas in our research the actual transgressor did not receive any punishment. In all three studies revenge was
solely directed at individual targets that were completely uninvolved
in the original transgression
Third, the present research further illuminates the features of
entitativity that lead to satisfaction in the aftermath of displaced
revenge by manipulating superficial similarity and interconnectedness between members of the transgressor's group orthogonally in
Study 3. Both facets are strongly related to peoples' perception of
entitativity (Ip et al., 2006). However, the question of how those
facets exactly relate to displaced revenge has still not been clarified.
Our results point at the important role of both similarity and interconnectedness between group members: avengers experienced
more satisfaction and justice when the members of the transgressor
group were manipulated to be strongly interconnected and similar in
their appearance.