Challenges to White meritocratic advantage strengthen rather than weaken White racial identity.

Evidence

We hypothesized that meritocratic threat would cause White individuals to distance themselves from their racial identity. Instead, it reliably increases White identity by two percentage-points (.023, p \ .044) (H4). Thus, out of four threats, three (distinctiveness, power, meritocratic) reliably increase White identity, with one (meritocratic) contradicting our expectations. — Efrén Pérez, Jessica HyunJeong Lee, Ana Oaxaca, Tania Solano Cervantes, Jasmine García Rodríguez, Kimberly Lam, and David McFall, Manifold Threats to White Identity and…, 49

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the hypothesized ‘disavowal’ pathway for status threats, parallel to real-world findings that disadvantaged groups often mobilize identity defensively. — connects to: White racial identity strengthens through contrast with minority out-groups — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1119

Broader Connections

• White racial identity strengthens through contrast with minority out-groups #expands (0.85) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1119