You can win but I can’t lose – A Research on Bias Against High-Status Groups and their Zero-Sum Beliefs About Discrimination, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, November 2014; by Assistant Professor of Psychology Clara Wilkins and Joseph Wellman, formerly a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at Wesleyan.
The study explains what causes people to espouse “zero-sum beliefs” i.e. a beliefs that gains for one social group come at a cost to another group—and what the consequences are of those beliefs.
The researchers found that “high-status groups” (specifically, whites and men) held zero-sum beliefs more often when they contemplated increasing bias against their own group than when they contemplated decreasing bias against their low-status counterparts (blacks and women).
Furthermore, greater endorsement of zero-sum beliefs corresponded with efforts to decrease outgroups’ ability to compete in society and efforts to increase the ingroup’s ability to compete. The researchers also discuss how this pattern may perpetuate social inequality.
You can have your copy of the article at ScienceDirect
