Institutional Integration, Marketized Mentality, and Group-focused Enmity: Understanding the Structural and Cultural Sources of Group Prejudice and its consequences

• Applicant: Dr. Andreas Hövermann
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology ; Sociological Theory
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 321360006

The planned project aims to foster a better understanding of a highly relevant social phenomenon: the devaluation of weak groups in society such as asylum-seeking or long-term unemployed persons. The proposal investigates the causes of Group-focused Enmity (GFE), i.e. prejudices against a range of social minorities, and its potential consequences by means of an approach based on Institutional Anomie Theory (IAT), a theory originally intended to explain crime rates on the macro level of society. The planned research project extends the joint work of the applicant with Prof. Messner and colleagues essentially on formulating and establishing a unique and novel explanatory approach for prejudices that emerge along with processes of marketization. Previous studies of the applicant´s research team have succeeded in three aspects: 1) translating IAT to the individual level of analysis, 2) expanding the scope of the theory to apply to a phenomenon other than crime - such as prejudice, and 3) applying IAT in multilevel frameworks, with "macro" encompassing both the societal and organizational level. The developed theoretical framework includes the institutional and the cultural component of societies and is based on the overarching analytical model, in which deficient individual integration in non-economic institutions such as the family, religion or politics and a shared marketized mentality (MM) - entailing a strong commitment to the principal values of the market economy - serve as important predictors of prejudice. The postulated marketization of various important societal institutions results in Anomie insofar as the cultural structure of society overemphasizes egoistic, success orientated goals and simultaneously devalues the legitimized means to succeed. This societal configuration fosters the adoption of evaluative criteria of out-groups that prioritize considerations of profitability, which is theorized to result in generalized devaluations of those groups - their members are perceived as useless or economically burdensome. The project consists of five empirical studies, which are aimed at publications in peer-reviewed journals. By means of secondary data analysis of accessible datasets and a newly gathered small-size sample, the project targets to enrich the current research agenda substantially in terms of the following important domains: sharpening the measures, clarifying the connections of the main concepts considering their effects on the societal and individual level, investigating their causal structure and analyzing their impact on related behavioral outcomes such as discrimination, violence or right-wing electoral intentions. The comprehensive and ambitious project is highly feasible given the applicant´s distinct expertise in this area, his advanced preparatory work, his outstanding data access options and the already existing research collaboration. The University at Albany constitutes an ideal research environment for this project.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor Steven F. Messner, Ph.D.