Beliefs about What Disadvantaged Groups Would Do with Power Shape Advantaged Groups’ (Un)Willingness to Relinquish it
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dominant groups often resist possible changes to the hierarchical status quo. Might such tendencies be partly rooted in negative—yet potentially malleable—meta-beliefs about how disempowered groups would use power if they gained control? We investigate these questions across three studies and eight independent samples (Total N = 7,460 analyzed responses) in the context of Black-White relations in the United States. Specifically, we examine White Americans’ meta-beliefs about whether Black Americans desire power to structure society into a hierarchy in which they are dominant versus to institute equality for all groups (i.e., meta-dominance beliefs). Across 6 cross-sectional sub-samples (Study 1, Samples A-F; N = 3,383), we developed and validated a measure of meta-dominance, and found that White Americans varied substantially in their beliefs about how Black Americans would use power. Critically, Whites’ meta-dominance beliefs were uniquely related to their opposition to policies empowering Black Americans as well as their support for efforts to maintain Whites’ position atop the social hierarchy, even when controlling for a range of relevant constructs. In two pre-registered experiments among White Americans (Studies 2-3; N = 4,077), one of which was a registered report, we tested two possible causal pathways that might explain this relation: (1) “Meta-Dominance Beliefs leads to Opposition to Black Empowerment” and (2) “Opposition to Black Empowerment leads to Meta-Dominance Beliefs”. We found evidence in support of the “Meta-Dominance Beliefs leads to Opposition to Black Empowerment” pathway, but not for the latter Opposition to Black Empowerment leads to Meta-Dominance Beliefs” pathway. We discuss our findings’ implications for theories of hierarchy-maintenance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".