Stigma and Coping with Intergroup Threat

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

Prejudice and discrimination remain ongoing and important problems for their targets as well as for society in general. This research builds on the principal investigator's earlier work examining how members of stigmatized, or low status, groups cope with being a potential target of negative stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination. The past work is extended to examine how members of privileged, or high status, groups cope when they find themselves in a similar predicament. This research is guided by the assumption that these coping processes are influenced by motives to maintain personal and social self-esteem, as well as by motives to justify the status quo. It is hypothesized that the extent to which people believe existing status differences between groups are legitimate shapes how they cope with social rejection and other negative events experienced in intergroup encounters. It is further hypothesized that the impact of believing status differences are legitimate differs depending on the status of one's own group compared to other groups in a given context. These hypotheses are tested in a series of experiments examining how members of groups that are traditionally high in social status (e.g., men, European-Americans) versus traditionally low in social status (e.g., women, ethnic minorities) cope with threats to self-esteem in intergroup contexts. These experiments test the impact of group status and beliefs about the legitimacy of that status on the extent to which individuals: (1) attribute negative outcomes to discrimination based on their group membership; (2) selectively devalue domains in which their own group compares unfavorably relative to other groups; and (3) selectively compare their situations with members of their own group, rather than with members of other group. This research is important because it advances our understanding of intergroup conflict as well as of processes of coping and resilience among targets of prejudice.