Perceived threat to group distinctiveness reduces social identity complexity

Evidence

This chapter has highlighted that diverse social experiences in the form of intergroup contact or need for and/or threat to distinctiveness may not only help explain variations in social identity complexity, but that social identity complexity may be a key mediating variable that helps explain how contact and distinctiveness needs and/or threat affect out-group attitudes. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 589

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• QUESTION: If social identity complexity is the mediator, does contact improve out-group attitudes only insofar as it raises identity complexity? Worth chasing the underlying empirical data on this mediation chain.

Related

• Social identity complexity mediates how intergroup contact shapes out-group attitudes (similarity 0.96)
• Threat to distinctiveness drives more complex identity structures, but evidence is sparse (similarity 0.91)
• Threats to distinctiveness drive simplified views of one’s multiple group memberships (similarity 0.90)
• Social identity complexity governs who counts as an in-group member (similarity 0.87)
• Intergroup contact may differentiate perceptions of one’s own group, not just outsiders. (similarity 0.86)
• Contact with cross-cutting others increases the cognitive complexity of one’s social identity. (similarity 0.86)
• Threat from similar outgroups drives more bias than threat from dissimilar ones. (similarity 0.86)
• Contact with one out-group improves attitudes toward unrelated out-groups (similarity 0.85)
• Multiple in-group categories can be cognitively represented in simplified or complex ways (similarity 0.85)
• Group-based identity forces precede realistic and symbolic threat perception (similarity 0.84)
• Groups very similar to the ingroup provoke more intergroup bias than dissimilar ones do. (similarity 0.84)
• Increasing cognitive complexity of one’s own identities reduces out-group prejudice without abandoning those identities (similarity 0.83)
• Representing multiple group memberships as overlapping raises tolerance for diversity (similarity 0.83)
• Ignoring group membership during contact does not improve intergroup attitudes (similarity 0.83)
• Improving intergroup relations requires changing identity thinking, not identity categories. (similarity 0.82)