Upward Resistance: Beliefs about Privilege and Status Inequalities among Marginalized Groups

How do people from marginalized sociodemographic groups perceive groups who hold structural power? Whereas some people justify existing systems of power to maintain the status quo, others seek to challenge those systems, believing that existing systems distribute power inequitably across social groups. We aimed to establish a new psychological construct that reflects and accounts for how marginalized groups are not merely passive recipients of other people’s prejudice but form attitudes that resist and reconstrue status inequalities. In seven studies (N = 1,973), we developed and validated a measure to assess stigmatized groups’ attitudes toward dominant groups: the Upward Resistance Scale (URS). We examined LGBQ people’s attitudes toward heterosexual people, racial minorities’ attitudes toward white people, women’s attitudes toward men, poor people’s attitudes toward the wealthy, and fat people’s attitudes toward thin people. We found that the extent to which participants acknowledged status discrepancies between their ingroup and the dominant outgroup, they felt greater upward resistance toward the dominant outgroup. Our findings suggest that the 14-item URS is valid and reliable for detecting individual differences in beliefs about dominant groups and the status and privilege that they occupy.