Income inequality undermines societies: the more inequality, the more health problems, social tensions, and the lower social mobility, trust, life expectancy. Given people’s tendency to legitimate existing social arrangements, the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) argues that ambivalence—perceiving many groups as either warm or competent, but not both—may help maintain socio-economic disparities. The association between stereotype ambivalence and income inequality in 37 cross-national samples from Europe, the Americas, Oceania, Asia, and Africa investigates how groups’ overall warmth-competence, status-competence, and competition-warmth correlations vary across societies, and whether these variations associate with income inequality (Gini index). More unequal societies report more ambivalent stereotypes, while more equal ones dislike competitive groups and do not necessarily respect them as competent. Unequal societies may need ambivalence for system stability: income inequality compensates groups with partially positive social images.

This research analyses the mediational role of threat perception in the relationship between prejudice and discrimination (opposition to immigration and opposition to naturalization of immigrants). In the first study, using representative samples in 21 European countries (N ¼ 36 566) from European Social Survey (2002), we showed that the relationship between prejudice and opposition to immigration was more strongly mediated by realistic than by symbolic threat perceptions. In Study 2, using representative samples in two countries with different traditions of immigration (Switzerland, N ¼ 940; Portugal, N ¼ 1514), we showed that realistic threat more strongly mediated the relationship between prejudice and opposition to immigration, while only symbolic threat perception mediated the link between prejudice and opposition to naturalization. The theoretical implications of considering threat perceptions as factors that legitimize discrimination are discussed. Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Research on the relationship between prejudice and discrimination (e.g. Lord, Lepper, & Mackie, 1984;McConahay, 1983;Smith & Dixon, 1968;Weitz, 1972) has been carried out within the more general framework of the early studies on the connection between attitude and behaviour (e.g. Kutner, Wilkins, & Yarrow, 1952;LaPiere, 1934;Wicker, 1969). While the literature on the relationship between attitude and behaviour specifies when attitudes predict behaviour (e.g. Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975;Zanna, Olson, & Fazio, 1980) and presents some hypotheses on how this process occurs (e.g. Fazio, 1990;Snyder, 1982; for a review, see Eagly & Chaiken, 1998), the literature on the prejudice-discrimination link still reveals some shortcomings in these matters (see Fiske, 1998Fiske, , 2000, for a review). In fact, the few studies concerning the when question have shown that the prejudice-discrimination correlation has a moderate magnitude (Dovidio, Brigham, Johnson, & Gaertner, 1996), and that this correlation depends on several moderators (Schutz & Six, 1996). To our knowledge, only the model proposed by Pereira, Vala, and Leyens (2009) has addressed the how question, predicting that the psychological processes through which preconceived attitudes lead to discriminatory behaviour involve justifying factors, such as threat perception. In fact, Pereira et al. experimentally showed that symbolic threat perception mediates the relationship between infra-humanization of Turkish people and the opposition to the adhesion of Turkey to the European Union (EU). The current paper extends Pereira et al.'s findings by testing whether distinct types of threats differentially mediate the relationship between prejudice and discrimination. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that the relationship between prejudice and opposition to immigration in Europe is more strongly mediated by realistic threat (Studies 1 and 2) and that the relationship between prejudice and opposition to naturalization is more strongly mediated by symbolic threat (Study 2).Europe...

Societal inequality has been found to harm the mental and physical health of its members and undermine overall social cohesion. Here, we tested the hypothesis that economic inequality is associated with a wish for a strong leader in a study involving 28 countries from five continents (Study 1, N = 6,112), a study involving an Australian community sample (Study 2, N = 515), and two experiments (Study 3a, N = 96; Study 3b, N = 296). We found correlational (Studies 1 and 2) and experimental (Studies 3a and 3b) evidence for our prediction that higher inequality enhances the wish for a strong leader. We also found that this relationship is mediated by perceptions of anomie, except in the case of objective inequality in Study 1. This suggests that societal inequality enhances the perception that society is breaking down (anomie) and that a strong leader is needed to restore order (even when that leader is willing to challenge democratic values).

Sociologists coined the term “anomie” to describe societies that are characterized by disintegration and deregulation. Extending beyond conceptualizations of anomie that conflate the measurements of anomie as ‘a state of society’ and as a ‘state of mind’, we disentangle these conceptualizations and develop an analysis and measure of this phenomenon focusing on anomie as a perception of the ‘state of society’. We propose that anomie encompasses two dimensions: a perceived breakdown in social fabric (i.e., disintegration as lack of trust and erosion of moral standards) and a perceived breakdown in leadership (i.e., deregulation as lack of legitimacy and effectiveness of leadership). Across six studies we present evidence for the validity of the new measure, the Perception of Anomie Scale (PAS). Studies 1a and 1b provide evidence for the proposed factor structure and internal consistency of PAS. Studies 2a-c provide evidence of convergent and discriminant validity. Finally, assessing PAS in 28 countries, we show that PAS correlates with national indicators of societal functioning and that PAS predicts national identification and well-being (Studies 3a & 3b). The broader implications of the anomie construct for the study of group processes are discussed.

This introductory article for the special issue entitled "Social Psychological Perspectives on the Legitimation of Social Inequality" reviews various theoretical frameworks applied to the study of this topic. Legitimation of social inequality occurs through individual-level, group-level, and system-level processes. In societies in which egalitarianism and fairness are core cultural values, legitimation permits differential treatment of people on the basis of their social group memberships while allowing people to maintain positive self-images, to reinforce group-based hierarchies and to justify a status quo that systematically benefits some individuals and groups more than others. In this article, we focus on three major theoretical perspectives in social psychology that have inspired most of the research featured in this special issue, and we offer a general overview of the articles to follow, expanding upon their connections to one another and to the theme of the issue. We highlight the promise of research on legitimation of social inequality not only for developing a deeper and more integrative theoretical understanding of intergroup relations but also for guiding interventions to achieve social equality in practice.