The Great Recession and Group-Based Control: Converting Personal Helplessness into Social Class In-Group Trust and Collective Action

Economic crises can threaten individuals' sense of control. At the same time, these crises often result in collective responses, such as class-based protest (e.g., the 99%), but also nationalism or xenophobia. We investigated how personal consequences of economic crises lead to both intragroup and intergroup responses and the role of control for these effects. Studies 1 and 2 show that personal income and fear of economic descent reduce people's personal control, which, in turn, fosters hostile interethnic attitudes (Study 1), and in-group trust toward one's own social class (Study 2). Study 3 tests the combined effect of personal control and salience of collective economic identity in an experimental field study in Germany and Spain. For Spanish participants, control deprivation increased collective efficacy when national economic identity was salient, which, in turn, increased collective action intentions. We discuss the conditions under which crisis-induced threat to personal control elicits collective responses and the consequences for intergroup relations, including across class lines.