The Silent Majority: Understanding And Increasing Majority Group Responses To Discrimination

Although strong norms exist against discrimination, majority group members are surprisingly unlikely to respond assertively to discrimination when they witness it. A number of factors contribute to majority groupmembers' nonresponse, including lack of intergroup contact, motivation not to see discrimination, unsupportive social norms, and the sense that only members of affected groups are entitled to respond to discrimination. This paper reviews the published evidence supporting this pattern and presents a model of targeted social referencing, whereby majority group members look to, and are uniquely inf luenced by, the opinions of minority group members in the domain of discrimination. This article reviews the causes and implications of targeted social referencing and proposes interventions aimed at increasing majority group responses to discrimination.