The social network of solidarity with migrants: The role of perceived injunctive norms on intergroup helping behaviors

Abstract

Using an ego-centered network approach, we examine across two studies whether and how injunctive network norms-behaviors that are approved by alters-are related to majority members' decisions to participate in helping actions supporting migrants. We hypothesize that the more people perceive their personal social networks as positive toward humanitarian actions for migrants, the more they consider their opinions on migration issues as self-defining, and the more they are willing to mobilize in helping behaviors. With a name generator approach, we collected personal social network data among majority members of Belgian, mobilized volunteers (Study 1, N = 204) and Swiss, non-mobilized participants (Study 2, N = 247). Results demonstrate the impact of injunctive network norms in promoting and maintaining helping actions for migrants, and the role of self-defining attitudes. Overall, the results highlight the importance of injunctive norms within personal social networks for participation in intergroup helping behaviors.

Understanding allies’ participation in social change: A multiple perspectives approach

“…that is by what other group members approve of (i.e., injunctive norms), and what they do (i.e., descriptive norms). Using a social network analysis approach, Roblain and colleagues 2020 Altogether, these papers illuminate new pathways for advantaged groups' potential involvement in allyship: perceptions of intergroup relations as interdependent and not antagonistic (Kosakowska-Berezecka et al, 2020;Stefaniak et al, 2020), meta-beliefs or expectations to be perceived as allies by disadvantaged groups (Adra et al, 2020), and egalitarian peer group norms (Roblain et al, 2020). They also deepen our knowledge about potential barriers to allyship, which seem to be particularly strong among highly identified advantaged group members.…”

“…In line with our understanding of allyship, we use a multiple perspectives approach as an organizing principle to identify themes that emerge in the papers included in this special issue. We start with four empirical papers investigating the advantaged groups' perspective (Adra et al, 2020;Kosakowska-Berezecka et al, 2020;Roblain et al, 2020;Stefaniak et al, 2020), followed by two papers examining the disadvantaged groups' perspective (Hasan-Aslih et al, 2020;Hildebrand et al, 2020). Lastly, we introduce two theoretical papers that use a multiple perspectives approach (Burson, & Godfrey, 2020;Selvanathan et al, 2020).…”

“…According to this research, the reason why high identifiers are not willing to challenge inequality (e.g., Iyer & Ryan, 2009;Osborne et al, 2019), is because they are more likely to perceive intergroup relations as antagonistic and endorse zero-sum beliefs (Stefaniak et al, 2020), and feel that their group has been unfairly portrayed (Adra et al, 2020). Furthermore, two papers in this issue highlight that allyship does not happen in a vacuum and reveal an interesting interplay between the broader normative climate that may not necessarily boost advantaged groups' engagement in allyship (Kosakowska-Berezecka et al, 2020), in contrast to local peer norms that can exert a positive influence (Roblain et al, 2020).…”

“…A multiple perspectives approach also implies that research should devote more attention to studying interactions and conflicts between activists, which can be accomplished in field studies using observational and qualitative methods. The majority of empirical work in this special issues is done with non-politicized samples (except for Roblain et al, 2020), making it harder to generalize and estimate the impact of the identified factors on the motivations and the perceptions of people who engage in actions against inequality. Prior work suggests that there are both qualitative and quantitative differences among politicized and unpoliticized individuals (see Turner-Zwinkels et al, 2017).…”

Solidarity and social behaviour: how did this help communities to manage COVID-19 pandemic?

“…Roblain et al (2020) argued that the two broad forms of solidaritybased actions can be distinguished as benevolent support and activist support. Benevolence aims at alleviating the suffering of people in need while activism, aims at changing the socio-political system (Roblain et al, 2020). Consequently, SS and CBA are gaining prominence in healthcare research (Lavery, 2018;Pratt, Cheah & Marsh, 2020).…”