Perceived stratification pushes social behavior from interpersonal toward intergroup patterns

Evidence

The economic or social realities of a society may be such (as, for example, in the case of the millions of unemployed during the Depression of the 1930s) that the impossibility of “getting out” on one’s own, as an individual, becomes an everyday reality that determines many forms of intergroup social behavior. But even this example is still relatively extreme. Many social intergroup situations that contain, for whatever reasons, strong elements of stratification perceived as such may tend to move social behavior away from the pole of interpersonal patterns toward the pole of intergroup patterns. This is as true of groups that are “superior” in a social system as of those that are “inferior” in it. The major characteristic of social behavior related to this belief is that, in the relevant intergroup situations, individuals will not interact as individuals, on the basis of their individual characteristics or interpersonal relationships, but as members of their groups standing in certain defined relationships to members of other groups. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2684