Economic crises can threaten individuals’ sense of control. At the same time, these crises often result in collective responses, such as class‐based protest (e.g., the 99%), but also nationalism or xenophobia. We investigated how personal consequences of economic crises lead to both intragroup and intergroup responses and the role of control for these effects. Studies 1 and 2 show that personal income and fear of economic descent reduce people's personal control, which, in turn, fosters hostile interethnic attitudes (Study 1), and in‐group trust toward one's own social class (Study 2). Study 3 tests the combined effect of personal control and salience of collective economic identity in an experimental field study in Germany and Spain. For Spanish participants, control deprivation increased collective efficacy when national economic identity was salient, which, in turn, increased collective action intentions. We discuss the conditions under which crisis‐induced threat to personal control elicits collective responses and the consequences for intergroup relations, including across class lines.

The relationships between subjective status and perceived legitimacy are important for understanding the extent to which people with low status are complicit in their oppression. We use novel data from 66 samples and 30 countries ( N = 12,788) and find that people with higher status see the social system as more legitimate than those with lower status, but there is variation across people and countries. The association between subjective status and perceived legitimacy was never negative at any levels of eight moderator variables, although the positive association was sometimes reduced. Although not always consistent with hypotheses, group identification, self‐esteem, and beliefs in social mobility were all associated with perceived legitimacy among people who have low subjective status. These findings enrich our understanding of the relationship between social status and legitimacy.

We examined the influence of exposure to traditional gender roles on the activation of gender stereotypes in Spanish women. An associative procedure was used to expose participants to stereotypical vs. counterstereotypical gender roles, and a word categorization task with stereotypically feminine communal/warmth and stereotypically masculine agentic/competence trait words measured participants’ automatic responses. Results show that women exposed to traditional roles reverse the activation of gender stereotypes. That is, they activated competence/agency faster for female primes and warmth/communion faster for male primes in a subsequent task. The implicit stereotype reversal was predicted by participants’ endorsement of positive attitudes toward affirmative action policies. The results are discussed in terms of the motivational influence of perceived discrimination in intergroup relations.

In this research, we examined how people cope with threats to personal control related to the global economic crisis. Three studies (one correlational and two experimental) tested the prediction that blaming social outgroups could serve as a means to restore a threatened sense of personal control. We found that outgroup blaming attributions are related to higher levels of personal control over the effects of the economic crisis (Study 1). Further, blaming outgroups helps to restore a sense of personal control (Study 2) only when blaming attributions are related to specific versus global causes (i.e., outgroups but not the economic system; Studies 2 and 3). We discuss individual and social implications of outgroup blaming as a form of coping with lack of control in the context of economic crises.

This article presents the cross-cultural validation of the Entitlement Attitudes Questionnaire, a tool designed to measure three facets of psychological entitlement: active, passive and revenge entitlement. Active entitlement was defined as the tendency to protect individual rights based on self-worthiness. Passive entitlement was defined as the belief in obligations to and expectations toward other people and institutions for the fulfillment of the individual's needs. Revenge entitlement was defined as the tendency to protect one's individual rights when violated by others and the tendency to reciprocate insults. The 15-item EAQ was validated in a series of three studies: the first one on a general Polish sample (N = 1,900), the second one on a sample of Polish students (N = 199) and the third one on student samples from 28 countries (N = 5,979). A three-factor solution was confirmed across all samples. Examination of measurement equivalence indicated partial metric invariance of EAQ for all national samples. Discriminant and convergent validity of the EAQ was also confirmed.