The Power of Warmth: Warmth Perception and Social Change-Oriented Allyship with LGBTQ+ People

Abstract While many countries have advanced LGBTQ+ rights, others have enacted anti-LGBTQ+ laws, underscoring the crucial role of allies in the fight for equality. However, not all allies are driven by genuine motivations to fight social injustice and achieve social change. To identify conditions of social change-oriented (vs. self-serving) collective action engagement, we conducted two studies among cis-heterosexual allies of the LGBTQ+ community. In two surveys (US N = 380; Hungary N = 388), we identified that perceiving LGBTQ+ people as warm was a stronger predictor of social change-oriented motivations than competence perceptions. To further explore the role of group perception in ally motivations, we conducted an experiment (UK N = 267; Hungary N = 304). We hypothesized that higher warmth perceptions would predict social change-oriented motivations and the connection would be mediated by empathy and outrage. In contrast, pity would be a mediator of self-serving motivations. The results demonstrated that manipulating perceptions of warmth effectively increased mobilization, furthermore, empathy mediated the relationship between group perception and social change-oriented (but not self-serving) motivations, which in turn predicted higher collective action intentions. We discuss that even improving warmth perception can lead to social change-oriented allyship.