Minority status raises identity complexity only absent threat perceptions

Evidence

By virtue of belonging to a numerical minority, and thus having greater exposure to and potentially greater awareness of the nonoverlapping nature of categories, minority members may have higher social identity complexity. However, this may only be the case if the situation does not give rise to threat perceptions. In high-threat situations, minority group members may of course display more exclusive, simplified representations of their multiple groups, especially if they identify highly with the category under threat (relatedly, prior research has shown that members of numerical minority groups are more cognitively preoccupied with their group membership than are members of majority groups; Lücken & Simon, 2005). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 581

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates and parallels the ingroup/outgroup cognition thread from the reader’s Allport reassessment: threat-driven cognitive narrowing of outgroup perception in minority members mirrors the classic prejudice-and-cognition findings. — connects to: Need for significance predicts extremism mainly when combined with discrimination or activist identity — Lea Echelmeyer, Anne-Marie Slotboom, and Frank Weerman, The Putative Effect of Identity on…, 234
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 581