The Silent Majority: Understanding and Increasing Majority Group Responses to Discrimination

Abstract

Although strong norms exist against discrimination, majority group members are surprisingly unlikely to respond assertively to discrimination when they witness it. A number of factors contribute to majority group members' nonresponse, including lack of intergroup contact, motivation not to see discrimination, unsupportive social norms, and the sense that only members of affected groups are entitled to respond to discrimination. This paper reviews the published evidence supporting this pattern and presents a model of targeted social referencing, whereby majority group members look to, and are uniquely inf luenced by, the opinions of minority group members in the domain of discrimination. This article reviews the causes and implications of targeted social referencing and proposes interventions aimed at increasing majority group responses to discrimination.

Aggressive confrontation shapes perceptions and attitudes toward racist content online

“…Other research in this area has shown that targets are expected to speak out against discrimination towards their group, yet they suffer the greatest consequences as a result of doing so (Vaccarino & Kawakami, in press). Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that majority group members are less likely to speak out against discrimination unless they receive reassurance (typically from the targets of discrimination) that an event is offensive or warrants response (Crosby, 2015). However, much of this research has been primarily conducted from the majority groups’ perspective, whereas in the current study we examine minority group perceivers who are the targets of discrimination in this context.…”

“…Additional research should be conducted to evaluate the role of perpetrator group membership in greater depth (for example, do the same effects exist if the perpetrators are other minority group members?). Furthermore, given the mixed results regarding group membership across our studies, more work is needed to disentangle whether targets of discrimination are more likely to socially tune into their ingroup (i.e., targeted social referencing; Crosby, 2015) or adhere to majority group norms (i.e., group norm theory; Sherif & Sherif, 1953).…”

“…Minority group members are often subject to targeted social referencing. When the topic of discrimination is made salient, minority group members’ opinions are perceived as “expert” and weighed much more heavily than those of majority group members (Crosby, 2015; Crosby & Monin, 2013; Crosby et al, 2008). If this is the case, we would expect that ingroup confronters and their type of response (aggressive vs. passive) should have more power to shape how offensive a transgression appears.…”

Tolerance of racism: A new construct that predicts failure to recognize and confront racism

“…For example, children may be taught that it is polite to ignore older relatives' prejudiced statements, lessons which later may be generalized to others. In addition, due to ongoing racial segregation, White people often lack knowledge about how to identify or respond to racial discrimination (Crosby, 2015).…”

“…Racism often is expressed in a subtle manner that can be subject to different interpretations (Dovidio et al, 2002;Swim et al, 2003). Considerable research shows that both majority members (Crosby, 2015) and members of stigmatized groups (Crocker et al, 1991;Crosby, 1984) find it difficult to determine whether or not certain behaviors constitute discrimination, particularly if they only have information about a single incident (Major & Dover, 2016).…”