Intergroup emulation: An improvement strategy for lower status groups

Abstract

The social psychological literature on social change has focused on how groups overcome oppression and inequality. In this paper, we investigate an alternative strategy that groups employ for social change—the emulation of successful outgroups. We propose that lower status group members will be likely to employ a learning strategy when they perceive the status relations as legitimate (i.e., fair system) and unstable (i.e., own position is improvable). In Study 1 (Romanian undergraduate students, N = 31), we manipulated status legitimacy, while in Study 2 (British undergraduate participants, N = 94), we manipulated legitimacy and stability orthogonally. Overall, when they perceived status hierarchies as legitimate and unstable, participants exhibited higher admiration for the higher status outgroup, higher support for learning-related help (e.g., transfer of know-how, training) from the outgroup and had the most positive attitudes toward intergroup help. We propose that social change sometimes occurs gradually, through help and learning from successful models, and this paper offers insight into such gradual social change.

Telescopes and microscopes of motivation: Emulative goals in admiration and envy differ in abstractness and temporal orientation

“…Furthermore, admiration at the intergroup-level predicts the desire to learn from a superior outgroup (Onu, Smith, & Kessler, 2015). Lastly, in multiple regression analyses by Van de Ven (2017), both benign envy and admiration were simultaneous predictors of upward motivation when recalling a comparison with someone who was better off.…”

Inspired by the outgroup: A social identity analysis of intergroup admiration

“…Our studies add to the small but growing literature focusing on intergroup admiration (see Onu et al, 2015;Sweetman et al, 2013). Intergroup relations research has focused overwhelmingly on conflict and the negative intergroup emotions associated with it (Pittinsky, 2012), to the detriment of positive emotions and approach behaviors.…”

Intergroup helping relations

“…Romanian students in Britain) who perceived their ingroup's low status as unstable and changeable approached members of the high status group (i.e. British students) with requests for autonomy oriented help [31]. Similar findings occur when ingroup members feel inferior to the outgroup on a moral dimension.…”