Support for group-based inequality among members of low-status groups as an ingroup status-enhancement strategy

We discuss the idea that competition-based motives boost low-status group members’ support for group-based hierarchy and inequality. Specifically, the more low-status group members feel motivated to compete with a relevant high-status outgroup, based on the belief that existing status positions may be reversed, the more they will defend status differentials (i.e., high social dominance orientation; SDO). Using minimal groups (N = 113), we manipulated ingroup (low vs. high) status, and primed unstable status positions to all participants. As expected, we found that SDO positively mediates the relation between ingroup identification and collective action, when ingroup’s status is perceived to be low and status positions are perceived as highly unstable. We discuss the implications of considering situational and contextual factors to better understand individuals’ support for group-based hierarchies and inequality, and the advantages of considering ideological processes in predicting collective action.

Overlap in processing advantages for minimal ingroups and the self

Cognitive biases shape our perception of the world and our interactions with other people. Information related to the self and our social ingroups is prioritised for cognitive processing and can therefore form some of these key biases. However, ingroup biases may be elicited not only for established social groups, but also for minimal groups assigned by novel or random social categorisation. Moreover, whether these ‘ingroup biases’ are related to self-processing is unknown. Across three experiments, we utilised a social associative matching paradigm to examine whether the cognitive mechanisms underpinning the effects of minimal groups overlapped with those that prioritise the self, and whether minimal group allocation causes early processing advantages. We found significant advantages in response time and sensitivity (dprime) for stimuli associated with newly-assigned ingroups. Further, self-biases and ingroup-biases were positively correlated across individuals (Experiments 1 and 3). However, when the task was such that ingroup and self associations competed, only the self-advantage was detected (Experiment 2). These results demonstrate that even random group allocation quickly captures attention and enhances processing. Positive correlations between the self- and ingroup-biases suggest a common cognitive mechanism across individuals. These findings have implications for understanding how social biases filter our perception of the world.

Hereditarily minimal topological groups

We study locally compact groups having all subgroups minimal. We call such groups hereditarily minimal. In 1972 Prodanov proved that the infinite hereditarily minimal compact abelian groups are precisely the groups {\mathbb{Z}_{p}} of p-adic integers. We extend Prodanov’s theorem to the non-abelian case at several levels. For infinite hypercentral (in particular, nilpotent) locally compact groups, we show that the hereditarily minimal ones remain the same as in the abelian case. On the other hand, we classify completely the locally compact solvable hereditarily minimal groups, showing that, in particular, they are always compact and metabelian. The proofs involve the (hereditarily) locally minimal groups, introduced similarly. In particular, we prove a conjecture by He, Xiao and the first two authors, showing that the group {\mathbb{Q}_{p}\rtimes\mathbb{Q}_{p}^{*}} is hereditarily locally minimal, where {\mathbb{Q}_{p}^{*}} is the multiplicative group of non-zero p-adic numbers acting on the first component by multiplication. Furthermore, it turns out that the locally compact solvable hereditarily minimal groups are closely related to this group.