Conveners
Brückensymposium: What brings us together and tears us apart? How group processes polarize our societies
- J. Lukas Thürmer (Paris-Lodron Universität Salzburg)
Description
Western societies are drifting apart, with members of different subgroups refusing to interact with each other. We unite cutting-edge research on group processes to help explain this divide. Martiny & Nikitin show that activating negative stereotypes about one’s group (i.e., age or gender) lead to reduced social approach motivation among members of these social categories in laboratory and field settings. Gollwitzer et al. extend their own research on motivated science reception and research on competitive victimhood to discuss novel conceptual approaches to victimhood narratives in social discourses and political campaigns. Flade, Klar, & Imhoff test the true-ism that larger groups unite in the face of a common threat. Indeed, threat inductions lead to a decategorization between subgroups in different national groups, including black and white Americans, Israeli Jews and Arabs, and German men and women. Criticism is central to democratic debate but Thürmer & McCrea argue that it can spur hostility. Indeed, group members were willing to invest their time and money to punish critical outgroup comments. We discuss how group processes contribute to the schism of Western societies.
Victimhood is typically associated with vulnerability, weakness, and moral patiency – both in the eyes of third parties and in the eyes of victims themselves. Thus, victimhood is often a liability that people should generally be motivated to avoid or prevent. That said, victimhood can sometimes also be an asset: claiming victimhood can imply an entitlement to demand restitution, compensation,...
A frequent rhetoric in the political arena calls members of larger groups like nations to lay aside all dividing differences and unite in face of a common threat. In the present research we sought to test whether such a unifying effect of external threat already manifests in such basic cognitive processes as automatic categorization even for such strong schisms as the ones between black and...
Western societies are increasingly divided into cohesive subgroups. We argue that the defensive rejection of criticism from outgroup members (intergroup sensitivity) contributes to this schism by spurring hostile defensive behaviors. Using diverse international samples, ten behavioral experiments show that group members prioritize counterarguing outgroup criticism over getting their individual...
Research shows that negative stereotypes can have a broad variety of negative consequences. However, not much is known about the consequences of negative stereotypes on interpersonal relationships. We will present and discuss two series of studies. In the first, we showed that the activation of negative gender stereotypes decreases female students’ social approach motivation toward people...
