Freedom to choose groups makes people abandon failing groups for higher-status ones.

Evidence

By contrast, individuals in high relational mobility societies can more freely choose in-groups, and to the extent that this is true, they should attempt to find and join groups that have higher rather than lower status, because the membership in the former will generally provide them with larger resources. Thus, people should constantly monitor intergroup status differences and attempt to associate with groups of higher status. Consistent with this idea, people in more residentially mobile societies, as well as individuals with larger personal residential mobility, generally change their in-group identity more opportunistically, depending on the success or failure of the in-group and its members, than those who are in less residentially mobile societies and those who move less (Oishi, Ishii, & Lun, 2009). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1644

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates ingroup-loyalty mechanisms from the prejudice literature — in high-mobility societies, ingroup commitment is conditional on status, undermining the assumption of stable partisan ingroup identification.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1644