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Without Mercy: The Immediate Impact of Group Size on Lynch Mob Atrocity

University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, ti12{at}kent.ac.uk

Brian Mullen

University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

Dominic Abrams

University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

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.

Key Words: self-attention • power threat • lynching • mob atrocity • intergroup relations

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