Defending or Challenging the Status Quo: Position Effects on Biased Intergroup Perceptions

The default ideological position is status quo maintaining, and challenging the status quo is associated with increased efforts and risks. Nonetheless, some people choose to challenge the status qu ...

. Alternatively, attitudes may be held due to external factors such as influence from family, friends, or media (Kenworthy & Miller, 2002). Further, people may hold certain attitudes because it is a way to experience emotions (Maio & Haddock, 2007). These dimensions have evaluative implications indicating their different social value creating a foundation for attributional biases. Thus, a person may be biased in his or her judgments of the origins of other people's attitudes as a function of whether these people hold the same or opposite opinion as themselves. In general, people tend to attribute less rational, and more external and emotional origins of the attitudes of those who disagree as compared to agree with themselves (Bäck et al., 2010;Kenworthy & Miller, 2002). In the present research, we explore how people who want to keep the status quo (defenders) and those who want to change it (challengers) attribute the attitude origins of those who agree and disagree with them. We have not limited challengers and defenders of the status quo to a specific attitude issue, but rather adopted a higher-level definition in that any individual choosing a standpoint Defending or Challenging the Status Quo 6 that opposes the status quo is defined a challenger and any individual choosing a standpoint in agreement with the status quo is defined a defender.

Experiment 1
To examine how challengers and defenders of the status quo attribute the attitude origins of their allies and opponents, participants in Experiment 1 were presented with a hypothetical scenario regarding a decision on a potentially important issue. The issue was supposed to be involving to the participants, at the same time as preference for or against the status quo should vary considerably. Hence, in the present experiment, high school students were asked if teachers should be allowed to confiscate students' cell phones during class hours in cases where they disturb the class. This issue has been debated somewhat in Sweden during the past years, as this has become a problem. The status quo maintaining position, the defending position, in this case was to not allow this. We expected that both challengers and defenders would show intergroup biases in attitude attributions, and ascribe more favorable origins of preferences of those who agree with them as opposed to those who disagree with them. We further tentatively predicted that challengers of the status quo, due to their exposed and vulnerable position, would be more biased than defenders.

Method Participants and design
Participants were 311 high school students (46 % males) from the larger Stockholm area.
Mean age was 17 years (SD = 0.81), ranging from 16 to 20 years. The design was a 2 (target group: agree/disagree with own preference) X 2 (position: challenging/defending the status quo position) mixed design with target group being the repeated factor and position varied between participants. The dependent variables were ratings of the origins of preferences of those who agreed and disagreed with own preference for both challengers and defenders. The Defending or Challenging the Status Quo 7 distribution of preferences were 208 defenders (67.0 %), and 100 challengers (32.0 %). Three (1.0 %) participants did not state a preference. These were excluded from further analyses.

Procedure and variable description
The experimental session took place in participants' schools and was integrated into the lessons. The experiment was part of another study, which was introduced as a study on decision-making in school. The experimenter handed out the questionnaires, which began with a brief description of the issue of whether teachers should be allowed to confiscate students' disturbing cell phones during class hours, or not. To make participants elaborate on the issue, they were instructed to list three values that they believed should be considered in relation to keeping or changing the status quo (e. g. to create a good learning environment, that each individual should be respected in school, that the school should be characterized by tolerance, etc). After some unrelated items, participants stated their own position in the issue (challenging or defending the status quo). Following this were further unrelated items, and then participants were asked to argue for their position. This was ostensibly to be used in a coming study on persuasion but the purpose was rather to increase participants' involvement.
This was followed by some more unrelated items. Then participants were instructed to answer questions about the origins of preferences of (a) students who shared their preference on the issue of confiscating disturbing cell phones (their allies), and of (b) students who did not share their preference (their opponents). Following the procedures first outlined by Kenworthy and Miller (2002), and later used by Bäck and colleagues (2010)

Results and discussion
Target group effects. Two repeated measures ANOVAs (one for each dimension) showed that there was a significant main effect of target group, such that allies were rated as more rational and less external than were opponents, regardless of participants' own position (F(1,294)=46.56, p <.001, η p 2 = .14, and F(1,298)=37.38, p <.001, η p 2 = .11, for rationality and externality respectively). Means and standard deviations are shown in Table 1 Position effects. There was a significant interaction effect between target group and own position, such that challengers showed stronger intergroup biases than did defenders. As can be seen in Table 1, this held true for both dimensions (F(1,294)=20.25, p <.001, η p 2 =.06, and F(1,298)=22.57, p < .001, η p 2 = .07, for rationality and externality, respectively). Hence, being a challenger seems to elicit stronger intergroup biases than being a defender of the status quo.
Previous research has shown that the default ideological position is conservative, and that challengers tend to be perceived more negatively than defenders by observers (Crandall et al. 2009;O'Brien & Crandall, 2005). In the current study we demonstrated that asking those identifying as challengers and defenders themselves to make judgments of their allies and Defending or Challenging the Status Quo 9 opponents moderated this pattern. In line with studies on attribution of attitude origins (Kenworthy & Miller, 2002;Bäck et al., 2010), we found that both challengers and defenders of the status quo attributed more rational reasons for the attitudes of those with whom they agreed, and more external reasons for the attitudes of those with a different opinion. This result is also in agreement with research on naïve realism, stating that people tend to perceive those who do not agree with one self as biased or misguided (Ross & Ward, 1996).
In the current study, we further found that challengers undermined, by ascribing more externality and less rationality, the position of defenders to a larger extent than defenders do of challengers' position. This result supports our notion that when being in the vulnerable, challenging position people become increasingly aware of the possibility that others will question their position, and leading to an increased motivation to justify and defend their choice. The results also extend findings by De Dreu and colleagues (2008) showing that challengers perceive defenders more negatively than the other way around on the group-level as well as in dyad interactions.
In previous research (Branscombe & Wann, 1994;Stephan et al., 2002;Kenworthy & Miller, 2002) it has been shown that perceived threat to social identity leads to increased biases. One factor associated with feelings of threat is the perceived numerical status of one's group. Kenworthy and Miller (2002) showed that when participants were told they were in the minority, they displayed stronger intergroup biases of the same kind as was found in the current study. Even though numerical status was never communicated to the participants it is possible that being on the challenging side also implicitly suggests being in the minority, while being on the defending side suggests being in the majority. Keltner and Robinson (1997) showed that both challengers and defenders of the status quo underestimated the actual prevalence of challengers and overestimated the actual prevalence of defenders. Hence, our Table 1. Moreover, analyses revealed main effects of position (F(1,124) = 4.83, p = .04, η p 2 = .03, and F(1,121) = 8.42, p = .004, η p 2 = .07, for rationality and externality respectively).
Again challengers showed stronger intergroup bias than did defenders, supporting results from Experiment 1. Means and standard deviations are shown in Table 1. Numerical status did not significantly affect biases, nor did the interaction between numerical status and position. However, looking at the means broken down by numerical status, shown in Table 2, one can see that the results were generally in the expected direction, such that those in the minority were slightly more biased than those in the majority, and defenders in minority showed slightly more biased as opposed to defenders in the majority. This result held true for rationality but were more inconsistent for externality. Results typically are stronger for the Defending or Challenging the Status Quo 14 rationality dimension (Bäck et al., Kenworthy & Miller, 2002), which could be interpreted as a more general priority of in-group favoritism to out-group derogation (Brewer, 2007).
In sum, Experiment 2 confirmed findings from the first experiment showing that challengers of the status quo tended to be more biased in their perceptions of their allies and opponents than were defenders. Further, the results suggest that numerical status is secondary to status quo position. We can only speculate why this is the case, but it seems plausible that given the widespread negative view on change (Crandall et al., 2009;De Dreu et al., 2008;Jost et al., 2004;O'Brien & Crandall, 2005;Skitka et al, 2002), actively choosing to violate the good and true status quo elicit a need for justifying oneself.

General discussion
In line with previous studies (Kenworthy & Miller, 2002;Bäck et al., 2010), the present research has shown that people tend to be biased in their perceptions of others whom they agree as opposed to disagree with, such that people tend to attribute more positive motives to those holding the same as opposed to different opinion as oneself. Specifically, those sharing own opinion are seen as more rational and less externally influenced than those who do not share own opinion, whom are instead seen as more externally influenced and less rational.
The results have implications for people's tolerance, respect, and understanding of conflicting perspectives, with potential important consequences for how they behave towards disagreeing others.
In the current research, we further demonstrated what we label a challenger bias; People who challenge the status quo are more biased than are people who want to keep the status quo. We argue that one potential explanation to this finding is that challengers are in a vulnerable and exposed position (De Dreu et al., 2008;O'Brien & Crandall, 2005), increasing the need to justify and defend themselves. One way to accomplish this is by increasing biases, and hence undermining the validity of the opponents' preferences (O'Brien & Crandall, Defending or Challenging the Status Quo 15   2005). Another explanation may be that such a position is associated with perceptions of threat, previously shown to increase biases (Kenworthy & Miller, 2002;Stephan et al., 2002).
Our results indicate that challengers' perceptions of their allies and opponents are in fact more extreme than defenders', which could explain why challengers in previous research have been rated as less reasonable, less flexible, and more contributing to the conflict (Kray & Robinson, 2001).
One potential confounder of the position effect found in Experiment 1 was the implied numerical status of the groups. Thus, the differences between challengers and defenders may actually have been due to challengers perceiving themselves to be in the minority, a factor shown to increase biases (Kenworthy & Miller, 2002). Our results indicate that this is not the case. Even though challengers were informed that the majority shared their position, biases did not decrease. Hence, being in the challenging position per se seems to override possible effects of numerical status. For the future, this finding is particularly interesting as it suggests that position and numerical status may carry qualitatively different information. The way these mechanisms operate need future attention.
Given that challengers are less tolerant of their opponents' point of view, they may be perceived as strenuous and stubborn, rather than innovative. This could possibly decrease the likelihood that defenders will take them seriously, which in turn may lead challengers to employ more extreme convincing methods. In line with this reasoning it has been shown that revisionists are often stereotyped as extremists (Keltner & Robinson, 1997