Removing the blinds on injustice: How privilege interventions can leverage morality to motivate engagement in social change

In this cumulative dissertation I examine how people from advantaged groups (i.e., White people, men) react to situations where the unearned advantages they receive from their group membership are being pointed out to them. Such privilege confrontations or interventions have recently received a lot of attention in social psychological literature and the issue has become an increasingly hot topic in political discourse. One hope of researchers and practitioners in this field is to inspire support for pro-egalitarian policies among those who profit from inequality. However, pointing out privilege often triggers defensive reactions. In this dissertation I therefore tackled the important question: How can we point out that inequality is unjust to those who profit from it? The starting point of this dissertation was the realization that privilege interventions have largely been studied as confrontations with evidence of personal privilege, which reflects an inappropriately individualized perspective on the systemic phenomenon that is inequality. Instead, I argue that research on privilege confrontations should examine how profiting from inequality can be communicated as a moral issue, thereby transforming systemic inequality into systemic injustice. Past research in the field has not explicitly investigated the role of morality, which is surprising because morality sits at the heart of pro-egalitarian motivation among political allies. The two manuscripts reported in this dissertation therefore examine two strategies how privilege confrontations might increase the moral relevance of unearned advantage. Manuscript 1 was inspired by research on confrontations with sexism, which showed that the positionality of the confronter (male or female) affected men’s responses to such confrontations. We therefore investigated whether men react differently to a male or female confronter of male privilege. Drawing from previous research on confrontations with ingroup transgressions, we examined specifically whether the confronter’s gender affected the amount of image appraisal (i.e., threat to the ingroup’s image) and moral appraisal (i.e., threat to the ingroup’s moral essence). Across three experiments with mixed-method design, we developed and tested a new appraisal-based model. We found that the female confronter triggered both more image and more moral appraisal, whereby image appraisal was associated with negative and moral appraisal was associated with positive attitudes toward male privilege. Manuscript 2 was based on collective memory research, which indicates that confrontations with a negative collective past can inspire a moral growth mindset. As such, situating White privilege in national colonial history might trigger moral motives of social justice. We indeed found that this contextualized confrontation increased social justice motives, although the effect was confined to groups who are presumably more critically attached to Germany. Interestingly, none of the three experiments replicated the defensive effects of confronting with evidence of White privilege found in previous research from the US and UK. Specifically, confronting White Germans with White privilege did not affect how much life hardships they claimed. Taken together, Manuscript 2 indicates that White privilege can be communicated more effectively to some groups when it is situated in the origins of racial inequality and that reactions to White privilege confrontations are more strongly shaped by cultural differences, even within “Western” nations, than previous research had anticipated. In total, the findings reported in this dissertation indicate the need to adapt some previous theoretical accounts on reactions to ingroup privilege. Specifically, they highlight the need and potential to investigate how moral considerations shape responses to privilege confrontations. There is also an urgent need to study in more detail how contextual factors shape the effects of confrontations with group-based privilege. More succinctly, the who, how, and where are important questions for future research to develop more effective privilege interventions that emphasize the systemic nature of social inequality to those who profit from it.