Privilege lost: How dominant groups react to shifts in cultural primacy and power

Abstract

As a function of their race, gender, class, and other social categories, long-standing privileges in social hierarchies have been afforded to some groups of people to the detriment of others. Recently, scholars have made considerable headway studying the social gains made by disadvantaged groups, including a better understanding of how relatively advantaged groups (e.g., White people; men) often pushback against and resist shifts in group-based power or prestige. The present body of work curates social psychological perspectives on the sense of privilege lost, the belief that one’s dominant group is losing ground to other groups. Here, we outline several dominant themes emerging from scholars in this field, including a better understanding of the psychological nature of group-based threat reactions, and for whom such demographic/power changes are deemed troubling, thus triggering pushback. We make recommendations for shaping future research on the perceived loss of group status and power.

Manifold Threats to White Identity and Their Political Effects on White Partisans

“…In addition, we encourage political psychologists to consider whether distinctiveness threat , power threat , and meritocratic threat each stem from a shared source—namely, the sense of status loss that follows from Whites’ demographic decline (Craig & Richeson, 2014; see also Hodson et al, 2022). Although we found that each of these threats explained unique variance in White identity, this pattern is also consistent with a view that each manipulation tapped into status threat, more generally.…”

“…Several studies validate perceived demographic decline as a menacing stimulus with political consequences among Whites (Craig & Richeson, 2014; Danbold & Huo, 2015). Yet demographic decline has multiple implications for a dominant ingroup’s status, including a loss in cultural primacy and political power (Hodson et al, 2022). Seminal work (Craig & Richeson, 2014) teaches us that status threat—operationalized by perceived demographic decline—causes Whites to express defensive political reactions (i.e., conservative shift).…”

Reclaim the streets: The link between positive and negative direct intergroup contact and movement support against immigration via threat perceptions

“…These primarily right‐wing and conservative groups are frequently found to protest against migration policies and the demographic shift toward a more diverse society, holding hostile attitudes toward immigrants. Recent research suggests that those majority members perceive these growing ethnic groups as threatening and fear the loss of their and dominant status in the society (Brown et al, 2022; Craig et al, 2018; Hodson et al, 2022).…”

“…While early collective action research focused mainly on disadvantaged groups and liberal goals, there is a growing body of research that has begun to analyse collective action form right‐wing and higher status groups (Becker, 2020; Choma et al, 2020). This research suggests that for example anti‐migration protests or protests against lower status groups have the goal to protect the group status against newcomers and thus to maintain intergroup inequalities (Brown et al, 2022; Çakal et al, 2016; Hasbún López et al, 2019; Hodson et al, 2022; Major et al, 2018; Shepherd et al, 2018).…”

“…These primarily right-wing and conservative groups are frequently found to protest against migration policies and the demographic shift toward a more diverse society, holding hostile attitudes toward immigrants. Recent research suggests that those majority members perceive these growing ethnic groups as threatening and fear the loss of their and dominant status in the society (Brown et al, 2022;Craig et al, 2018;Hodson et al, 2022). While these issues have been discussed in multicultural contexts such as the US for a long time (Craig et al, 2018), the European refugee crisis in 2015 intensified the debate about a more ethnically diverse society in Germany and led to the establishment of an anti-migration movements (Kleinert & Schlueter, 2022;Thran & Boehnke, 2015), and the strengthening of right-wing and populist parties such as the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) (Vieten & Poynting, 2016).…”