Dissociative threat: underperforming to distance the self from undesirable groups
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This study aims to introduce the concept of dissociative threat, which is the fear of being associated with an undesirable (dissociative) group as a result of demonstrating ability in a domain that is stereotypically linked to that group. Consumers experiencing dissociative threats use inability signaling as a self-presentational strategy in which they present themselves as lacking ability in the dissociative domain. Design/methodology/approach Five experimental studies were conducted to test whether consumers experience threat in dissociative domains and to examine factors that influence this threat. Findings Results showed that dissociative threat adversely affects consumers’ performance at tasks that require using products linked to dissociative groups. Threatened participants reported intentions to perform poorly and train for a longer time in preparation for such tasks, thus signaling low ability in dissociative domains. Additionally, when participants who were experiencing dissociative threats received confirmation that they lacked ability in that domain, their performance at these tasks improved. Research limitations/implications This study expands the knowledge on strategies, including inability signaling, that consumers use to avoid being linked to dissociative groups. Practical implications The findings suggest to marketers that stereotypes that link their products to certain consumer segments can threaten other consumers. Factors that shape and alleviate this threat are identified, which may help companies who are marketing such products. Originality/value This study extends the current understanding of stereotype threat and proposes a new self-presentational strategy, that has not been documented yet in the literature (i.e. inability signaling), that consumers use to deal with the dissociative threat.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".