Territorial Attributes of Ethnic Categories: Associations of Perceived Warmth, Competence, and Status with the Perceived Disadvantage of Associated Territories

Abstract

The study examines how the perceived social and economic disadvantage of a territory, conceptualized as a second-order attribute of an ethnic category, is associated with the warmth attributed to that category (i.e., with its perceived benevolent or hostile intentions) and with its competence, both directly and through its perceived status. The empirical data comprised evaluations provided by 436 respondents. Each respondent evaluated Belarusians, Buryats, Armenians, Chinese, and Chechens, as well as the territories associated with these categories: Belarus, Buryatia, Armenia, China, and Chechnya, producing a total of 2,180 observations. The five categories were selected to capture different expected combinations of relatively high and low warmth and competence, as well as differences in their positions within the structure of relations among ethnic categories. The analysis tested whether a relatively more negative evaluation of a particular territory was accompanied by less favorable positioning of the associated category within the same respondent’s system of evaluations. To this end, associations within the set of five category–territory pairs were separated from stable differences between the pairs themselves and from betweenrespondent differences in overall rating levels. Within an individual respondent’s system of evaluations, relatively higher ratings of both social and economic territorial disadvantage were associated with lower perceived status of the corresponding category. Higher status, in turn, was associated with higher ratings of warmth and, especially, competence. Social disadvantage was additionally negatively associated with warmth and, less robustly, with competence, whereas the direct associations of economic disadvantage with warmth and competence were statistically indistinguishable from zero when social disadvantage and status were simultaneously taken into account. The findings describe the organization of relationships between attributes of different orders within the construction of ethnicity: evaluations of territory as a second-order attribute were associated with stereotype content primarily through the status ascribed to the category and only partly directly. The study empirically specifies one of the relationships posited by the descriptive model of the construction of ethnicity and shows that the first- and second-order attributes examined here form not a simple list, but a statistically organized system of relationships.