Low-status group members habituate to cross-group anxiety more than high-status members do
Evidence
As for anxiety, members of low status groups likely have more experience interacting with higher status outgroups than members of high status groups have interacting with lower status outgroups. Thus, relatively low status group members may have adapted to the anxiety associated with interacting with higher status outgroups, which may reduce the impact of anxiety on their outgroup attitudes. However, if high status group members have little experience interacting with low status outgroup members, the anxiety they experience may have a large impact on their outgroup attitudes. — Blake M. Riek, Eric W. Mania, and Samuel L. Gaertner, Intergroup Threat and Outgroup Attitudes, 130
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Relevant to the reader’s MOC thread: habituation asymmetry suggests high-status selves that rarely encounter the excluded outgroup experience sharper anxiety — boundary bustle may be a symptom of unfamiliarity, not just dependence.
Related
- Intergroup contact asymmetries moderate how much anxiety shapes outgroup attitudes by status (similarity 0.90)
- Threat effects on attitudes are stronger for low-status than high-status outgroups (similarity 0.81)
- Group status moderates threat-attitude relationships (similarity 0.80)
- Equal-status group threat effects remain unexplored (similarity 0.80)
- Negative outgroup contact raises anxiety, which breeds hostility and contact avoidance. (similarity 0.79)
- Threat dynamics among status-equal groups remain unexamined. (similarity 0.78)