Thread by @DegenRolf

Even conservatives tend to portray disadvantaged groups as weak and helpless victims when they seek to curry favor with liberals. osf.io/preprints/psya… Despite the strength many members of disadvantaged groups [e.g., refugees or people facing poverty] show, they are often stigmatized as essentially weak, passive victims. In 11 studies with 1,948 participants we show that weak-victim narratives are common, especially among liberals: they are well-represented in media, especially liberal media. Weak-victim narratives conflate weakness (“weak”) with a sympathetic recognition of disadvantage (“victim”). This ambiguity facilitates their endorsement among liberals. The combination of high warmth and low agency makes weak-vctim narratives by definition paternalistic. Alongside their sympathetic acknowledgment of disadvantage, weak-victim narratives overgeneralize group members’ weakness and represent this weakness as determined by their group membership. Experimental data also suggest that people sometimes endorse the weak-victim narrative strategically when seeking approval from liberals. Correlational and experimental evidence show that the weak-victim narrative, as compared to a strong-agent narrative, leads liberals to see members of disadvantaged groups as less strong and agentic and to treat people in ways that are functionally disempowering: donating more money to disempowering rather than empowering aid organizations known to undermine recipients’ confidence in their abilities through paternalistic representations of aid, and encouraging students to quit challenging but valuable learning opportunities. It is worth comparing the weak-victim narrative with narratives commonly endorsed by political conservatives, such as narratives that portray disadvantaged groups as incompetent. Both kinds of narratives allege a deficiency in target group members.