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Invisibility of Social Privilege to Those Who Have It

Year: 2020
Type: preprint
Abstract: The U.S. faces deep social divides, with socially dominant and subordinate groups clashing over how much privilege the former enjoys and how much hardship the latter endures. These differences arise in part because privilege is invisible to those who have it. Dominant groups are hypocognitive of privilege, having more fragmentary and impoverished cognitive representations of what the concept is, relative to subordinate group members. Across 13 studies, this difference revealed itself in impaired performance on cognitive tasks involving privilege. Relative to those from subordinate groups (women, Black and Asian Americans, left-handers), dominant group members (men, White Americans, right-handers) needed more information about everyday behavior to recognize themes of discrimination, generated fewer examples of discrimination, and remembered fewer discriminatory instances from a questionnaire or videotaped talk. They also categorized instances of discrimination on a reaction time task more slowly. These cognitive performance deficits predicted group differences in beliefs about whether privilege and discrimination exist. Performance differences persisted whether privilege was framed as the absence of disadvantages or presence of advantages and whether discrimination was made salient or not. After watching a transgender woman describe discrimination experienced as a woman, both men and women showed increased awareness of male privilege and gender discrimination. Findings suggest that the invisibility of one’s privilege need not solely reflect identity-defensive motivations, but may also stem from cognitive deficits in conceptual knowledge about privilege and discrimination.
DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/tuy8m
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4235725764
Cites: 36
Cited by: 3
Related to: 10