Walter G. Stephan, Oscar Ybarra, Kimberly Rios Morrison — Intergroup Threat Theory

36 published claims from this book.

• Common external threats can reduce prejudice among ordinary outgroups
• Cultural dimensions explain why militant Muslim fundamentalists feel threatened by the West.
• Different outgroup types provoke distinct kinds of threat
• External threat makes groups punish their own deviants harder
• False-alarm threat perception is favored over missed threats by default
• Fear adaptively prompts avoidance while anger mobilizes group response
• Group-level and individual-level threats are experienced independently by the same person.
• Group-level threats and individual-level threats trigger systematically different responses
• High-context communication cultures feel threatened by cross-cultural interaction.
• Individual and collective self-esteem predict threat perception in opposite directions.
• Individual threat evokes fear while group threat evokes anger
• Intergroup threat susceptibility is predictable from personality and background traits
• Low power groups feel more threat; high power groups react harder to it
• Lower-echelon volunteers sent abroad meet nearly every condition for high perceived threat.
• Misperceiving false threats is cheaper than missing real ones, biasing humans toward seeing threats.
• Negative stereotypes cause threat rather than being a distinct threat type themselves.
• Perceived outgroup threats damage intergroup relations even without hostility
• Perceived threat, not actual threat, drives exclusionary attitudes
• Perceived threats escalate through interactive feedback loops between groups
• Perceived value differences trigger symbolic threats but not realistic threats
• Realistic threats are more negotiable than symbolic ones because core values resist change
• Symbolic threats drive dehumanization and the most vicious cruelty
• Symbolic threats favor assimilation while realistic threats favor separatism
• Threat amplifies attribution biases that exonerate ingroups and damn outgroups
• Threat amplifies preexisting intergroup responses rather than creating them
• Threat amplifies the ultimate attribution error in intergroup perception.
• Threat biases memory, stereotype disconfirmation, and perceived outgroup size.
• Threat can redirect hostility toward unrelated weaker outgroups
• Threat can spur overfriendly behavior aimed at proving non-prejudice
• Threat shifts supposedly stable ideological dispositions like authoritarianism
• Threat-driven cognitive biases facilitate and justify intergroup violence
• Threat’s time course and unconscious operation remain largely unknown
• Threatened groups deny outgroups distinctively human emotions
• Tight cultures perceive more intergroup threat than loose cultures do.
• Uncertain, unfamiliar, low-power settings maximize perceived outgroup threat.
• Uncertainty, disadvantage, and competition in a setting amplify perceived threat.