Abstract
Inherent to any substantive social change is the disruption of the status quo. To the extent that individuals are motivated to preserve the current social system (e.g., Jost & Banaji, British Journal of Social Psychology, 33, 1–27, 1994), even social change in pursuit of positive goals might evoke ambivalent reactions. Although activist groups might elicit positivity because they are assumed to have positive qualities and they seek positive goals, they might evoke negativity because their actions disrupt the current social system. These experiments examined two different forms of disruption of the status quo. In Experiment 1, a group gaining power elicited greater ambivalence than a group losing power, regardless of the valence of the group’s goal. Importantly, the conditions that evoked ambivalence did not inhibit behavioral support. Experiment 2 found that a new group elicited more ambivalence than an established group when pursuing a positive goal. Consistent with theories emphasizing maintenance of the status quo, these findings demonstrate that attitudes toward activist groups do not derive solely from self-interest.
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Notes
A measure of ambivalence calculated with the Gradual Threshold Model formula (Priester & Petty, 1996) produced similar results.
Due to an error, not all participants received both positivity and negativity measures, and thus the ambivalence index could not be calculated for all participants. Analyses examining positivity and negativity separately (thus including all participants) showed similar patterns of means and significant findings as the analyses based only on participants who completed both measures.
Because the distribution of men and women across the cells was unbalanced, we did not examine participant sex as an independent variable in these studies.
The Group × Opposition to Equality interaction emerged, p = .03, such that participants’ projected success for established groups was similar for those low in opposition to equality (M = 5.00, SD = 1.60) and high in opposition to equality (M = 4.15, SD = 1.52). However, new groups’ projections of success were marginally greater, p = .07, among participants high in opposition to equality (M = 3.83, SD = 1.59) than those low in opposition to equality (M = 2.87, SD = 0.92).
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Kurt Hugenberg for comments on a draft of this manuscript. We also thank Megan Bezy, Annie Heiliger, Rachael Hunt, Hollis Hunter, Emily Kistler, Katie LaMere, Amber Merlau, Jacinda Moore, Jenny Schinke, Kari Terzino, Shannon Thorpe, Dan Tranter, and Dawn Marie White for help in conducting this research.
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Diekman, A.B., Goodfriend, W. The Good and Bad of Social Change: Ambivalence Toward Activist Groups. Soc Just Res 20, 401–417 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-007-0050-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-007-0050-z