Collective Spirit or False Consciousness? Testing Two Complementary Models of Integrating Group-based Control and Compensatory Control Processes

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Immo Fritsche
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 441391823

People need to feel in control over important aspects of their life. Under conditions of lacking personal control (e.g., personal or societal crises) they try to restore or maintain their sense of control. According to two competing theories, people employ their social environment (i.e., others) to re-establish subjective control or to cope with the adverse consequences of control loss. Compensatory control theory (CCT) proposes that people aim at reducing uncertainty and establishing structure in their environment and pursue this by supporting powerful external agents and social structures (e.g., hierarchies) that keep chaos at bay and by rejecting social change (i.e., conservative shift). In contrast, group-based control theory (GBCT) proposes that when experiencing lacking personal control people first try to re-establish a sense of control through their social self by identifying with agentic ingroups or striving for collective agency in self-defining ingroups (e.g., through collective action). In a preceding DFG project we found strong evidence for the primacy of this group-based control response by experimentally demonstrating that GBCT can explain the results of earlier CCT studies. In general, we showed that people who were reminded of low (vs. high) personal control appreciated and supported social hierarchies and social change more when, and only when, this implied collective agency of self-defining ingroups. In a two-years follow-up project we aim to clarify whether compensatory control, or other uncertainty reduction responses, play any role in coping with personal helplessness at all (and if yes, what their role is). Therefore, we will test two possible integrations of GBCT and CCT. First, threatened people may turn to compensatory strategies when no potentially agentic ingroup seems available. In three experiments, we will test the specific boundary conditions under which people abandon group-based for compensatory control (i.e., when the ingroup lacks both current and potential agency). Second, people may strive for structure and order within groups as an indirect route to group-based control, as our initial findings on hierarchy support suggest. Accordingly, two experiments will test whether highly (vs. lowly) structured ingroups increase control perceptions of highly identified group members via increasing perceptions of collective agency, measuring and manipulating the mediator. In a further experiment, we will investigate whether people more strongly identify with highly (vs. lowly) structured ingroups as a GBCT response to personal control threat. The results will not only help to integrate competing theories of socio-psychological responses to threatened control. Also, they will contribute to explaining and predicting effects of social inequality and societal crises on whether and when deprived individuals either justify or collectively challenge the conditions and systems that hold them down.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants