Ingroup Policing and Perceptions of Collective Costs among Black Americans

• In Event: Status Inequality and Political Preferences

Abstract

Members of stigmatized groups, in contrast to those who belong to more dominant social groups, often engage in ingroup policing, choosing to expend limited psychological and social resources to monitor and regulate stereotype-confirming behavior among fellow group members. Group members feel compelled to engage in this kind of ingroup policing, we argue, because they perceive that the group as a whole pays a collective cost when group members engage in negatively stereotyped behavior. Using African Americans as a test case, we develop a novel measure to capture individual-level variation in group members’ perceptions of collective costs and describe the social and psychological correlates of the measure. We go on to demonstrate the measure’s distinctiveness from a more familiar measure of linked fate and examine the role that perceptions of collective costs plays in shaping how individuals respond to the behavior of ingroup members. We also leverage a series of experiments to examine whether concerns about collective costs are diminished when negatively stereotyped behavior occurs in view of one’s ingroup versus a more dominant outgroup. Finally, we test whether shifts in perceptions of the group’s status in society mitigates concerns about collective costs, thus lessening the likelihood that individuals engage in ingroup policing. We discuss the implications of this work for scholarship on social identity and stigma in the social sciences, drawing attention to the important role that status and hierarchy play in affecting the kind of considerations that attach to identity categories.

Author

• Hakeem Jerome Jefferson, Stanford University