We suggest that Whites’ declining share of the U.S. population threatens their status as the most prototypical ethnic group in America. This prototypicality threat should lead to growing resistance toward diversity, motivated by the desire to reassert Whites’ standing as prototypical Americans. In Study 1, how dramatically Whites perceived their share of the population to decline predicted support for cultural assimilation, mediated by prototypicality threat (controlling for realistic and symbolic threat). This relationship held only among Whites who felt that ethnic groups differ in their prototypicality, not among those who saw all groups representing America equally. Study 2 experimentally manipulated exposure to demographic projections such that Whites who saw their group shrinking showed weaker diversity endorsement relative to those who believed their share to be stable, again mediated by prototypicality threat. These findings reveal Whites’ threatened prototypicality as a novel, emerging source of resistance toward diversity in 21st-century America.

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We tackle the persistent problem of people from specific demographic groups (e.g., women) being undervalued in professional contexts in which traits associated with their group do not align with the traits perceived to be essential for success (the professional prototype). We introduce the concept of balancing professional prototypes such that group membership becomes irrelevant to determining an individual’s prototypicality. Using a novel technique called prototype inversion, we emphasize the importance of professional traits typically associated with an underrepresented group, without dismissing those associated with the currently prototypical group. By balancing the prototype in this way, it becomes easier to recognize the professional potential of members of underrepresented groups, without incurring backlash from the currently prototypical group. We conducted a full-cycle research project to demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy in the extreme context of women in firefighting using qualitative and quantitative methods and participants from both the laboratory and the field.

This research estimates the points of relative group representation at which members of dominant and nondominant groups declare an organization to be diverse. Across 7 studies, members of dominant groups, relative to members of nondominant groups, reported that diversity was achieved at lower representations of the nondominant group within an organization. This was explained by the dominant group members' relative opposition to using the equal representation of groups as a standard against which to judge diversity. This mediation was also replicated with the antiegalitarian dimension of social dominance orientation, suggesting that the setting of diversity thresholds serves a hierarchy relevant function. Group differences in thresholds of diversity were strongest when people were evaluating whether an organization was sufficiently (vs. descriptively) diverse, when group status was perceived to be threatened, and when the nondominant group was also a numerical minority in the relevant context.

We propose a theoretical framework for when and why members of dominant groups experience threat and express intolerant attitudes in response to social change. Scholarship on symbolic threat suggests that the detection of intergroup differences in values and norms is sufficient to elicit negative intergroup attitudes. Building on this theory, we argue that the experience of threat is actually shaped by prospective beliefs about difference (i.e., expectations of whether outgroups will assimilate to ingroup norms over time or not). Across two studies and two accompanying pilots, we show how outgroup assimilation expectation shapes dominant groups’ experiences of threat, specifically as it relates to their ability to define the norms of their superordinate category (prototypicality threat). We observe that members of dominant groups are surprisingly tolerant of both social change and intergroup difference in the present, so long as they expect outgroup assimilation in the future.