Group-Based Hierarchies of Power and Status

Group-based identities (e.g., gender, ethnicity, religion) shape people’s life experiences and outcomes, often forming the basis for group-based inequality and social hierarchy. This chapter provides an overview of social scientific (primarily psychological) research investigating people’s experiences of and responses to group-based hierarchy and how individuals’ identities impact these outcomes. We outline when and why people seek to influence group-based hierarchy: seeking to maintain or enhance an existing hierarchy, by protecting or improving the relative position of dominant groups, respectively. Or, people may seek to mitigate or rearrange group-based hierarchy, changing groups’ relative positions to improve the position of marginalized groups and either flattening the distance between groups or maintaining the amount of hierarchy, respectively. We discuss research on how people react if a hierarchy is perceived to be under these different states (e.g., maintained, enhanced, mitigated, rearranged) and end with open questions and opportunities for future work.