Investigating the Moderators in the Relationship Between Righteous Anger and Support for Lynching

Abstract

Lynching is an act of assault in which a mob executes punishment of a suspect through physically attacking and torturing the suspect without trial and following legal procedures. As such acts of violence pose a serious threat to justice, human rights, and the rule of law. A couple of recent studies have explored the significance of anger, police legitimacy, and political encouragement in relation to support for vigilantism. This study also corroborates with these earlier findings. However, in addition, it contributes in finding moderating effect of police lawfulness in the relationship between righteous anger and support for lynching. A multistage random sampling procedure was employed to collect data from university students for the cross-sectional survey. Our moderation analysis shows that righteous anger, police lawfulness, and political encouragement significantly affect support for lynching. However, contrary to previous findings, trait anger does not affect such support. Moreover, only the moderating effect of police lawfulness turns out to be significant. Thus, our findings suggest that in order to prevent and reduce support for lynching, police need to be lawful and incorrupt, and religious-political leaders also need to be cooperative in de-escalating acts of lynching.