Appraisal of male privilege: On the dual role of identity threat and shame in response to confrontations with male privilege

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104492Get rights and content

Abstract

Interventions that confront men with male privilege can threaten their social identity. Past research on White privilege confrontations has suggested group-image threat is a positive predictor of positive privilege attitudes. However, research on emotional appraisals of ingroup transgressions demonstrates that feelings of shame elicited by the ingroup's negative image lead to less constructive responses while feelings of shame elicited by the ingroup's moral failure motivate more positive reactions. To reconcile these different predictions, we examined how relevant dimensions of threat (to the ingroup's image or to moral values of the group) and subsequent experiences of shame (image shame, moral shame) affect men's privilege attitudes in response to male privilege confrontations. Across three preregistered experiments (N = 1463 men), we found that male confronters were evaluated more positively, which was explained through lower levels of image concerns toward male confronters. We also found evidence that morality concerns are related to more positive responses. Although the total effects on privilege attitudes were small, our findings highlight the importance for future research and practice to distinguish between the positive effects of moral threat through moral shame and the negative effects of group-image threat through image shame in privilege interventions.

Section snippets

Identity threat in privilege confrontations: the 3D model

The 3D model (Knowles et al., 2014) provides a theoretical framework to explain why White people, on the one hand, deny, distance or, on the other hand, dismantle their White privilege. According to this model, reactions toward privilege confrontations depend on the extent to which the confrontation elicits meritocratic threat (“a threat to the personal self and its competence”; Knowles et al., 2014, p. 598) and/or group-image threat (“a threat to the collective self and its moral

The role of morality and shame in confrontations with ingroup transgressions

Research on the effects of confrontations with moral failure and ingroup transgressions has investigated the role of identity threat based on the emotional appraisal of the confrontation, finding that the emotional appraisal of such a confrontation can predict subsequent reactions (Gausel, Leach, Vignoles, & Brown, 2012). When moral failure is perceived to be a specific self-defect, this can lead to feelings of shame, and subsequently to self- and social improvement. However, if moral failure

The role of ingroup/outgroup confronter status on privilege appraisal and responses to their confrontation

The potential existence of two distinct paths or modes of appraising ingroup threat raises another important question: When do men perceive a male privilege confrontation as a threat to their group's image versus a threat to their ingroup's moral integrity? Previous research found, for example, that when ingroup members (compared to outgroup members) question ingroup morality, they trigger more emotional and physiological reactions (Ellemers et al., 2013). We suggest that our appraisal-based

Overview of the model and studies of this paper

The current paper develops an appraisal-based model to (male) privilege confrontations across three studies: In Study 1, we investigated the explanatory value of group-image and meritocratic threat as proposed in the 3D model. In Study 2, we examined the role of shame as a mechanism behind the reactions to privilege confrontations and compared text-based responses toward a male and female confronter. In Study 3, we tested the full appraisal-based model, examining the role of the moral appraisal

Study 1

In this study, we aimed to test the 3D model's suggestion that meritocratic and group-image threat are oppositional mediators explaining less and more positive responses to the privilege confrontation respectively. We also explored whether threat is affected by the confronter's gender. The hypotheses of Study 1 were preregistered based on the 3D model's propositions and are presented here in a summarized form:

Hypothesis 1

A confrontation with male privilege (compared to a low-threatening information) will

Study 2

We conducted Study 2 to investigate whether men's responses to privilege confrontations differ as a function of the confronter's gender. We thus collected and content-coded text-based reactions. Based on the results of Study 1 and the previous finding that ingroup confronters are better positioned than outgroup confronters to question the morality of the ingroup (Ellemers et al., 2013), we expected that men have more positive privilege attitudes after reading a confronting text written by

Study 3

The appraisal-based approach is rooted in the idea that confrontations with ingroup privilege can be perceived as threatening the ingroup's image (image appraisal) and/or the ingroup's moral integrity (moral appraisal). These different appraisals of the confrontation should then be related to different dimensions of shame (i.e., image shame and moral shame). Finally, image shame should lead to negative privilege attitudes and moral shame to constructive privilege attitudes. Therefore, we

General discussion

Men are better allies in the quest for dismantling sexist structures when they are aware of systemic ingroup privilege and acknowledge that there are structures that invisibly and automatically provide men with benefits that women do not enjoy (Droogendyk et al., 2016; Kutlaca, Radke, et al., 2020; Radke, Kutlaca, Siem, Wright, & Becker, 2020). Thus, exploring what makes male privilege confrontations more (or less) effective is an important avenue of research. We examined different dimensions

Conclusion

The current paper demonstrates that the identity threat following privilege confrontations can be separated into concerns about the ingroup's image and the ingroup's morality. We found that image concerns have negative and moral concerns have positive implications for subsequent privilege attitudes. Our findings also suggest that male allies trigger less backlash and less group-image threat. Male allies might therefore harness their ingroup position to inspire moral concerns about male

Open practice

The pre-registrations, supplementary material, manipulation material, data sets and result outputs are stored in an Open Science Framework repository: https://osf.io/pysdw/?view_only=69faa4cdedac49bd97baafa6d1eda76b

Declaration of Competing Interest

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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