DEFENDING THE STATUS-QUO - POWER AND BIAS IN SOCIAL-CONFLICT

We hypothesized that partisans who represent power and the status quo would judge their opponents less accurately than would partisans seeki ng change, who would be stereotyped as extremists. We surveyed the att itudes and book preferences of traditionalist and revisionist English professors, who differed in their inclinations to preserve or change t he literary status quo. Both groups overestimated the differences in t heir attitudes and book preferences, the extremity of their opponent's conviction, and the numerical balances of the two sides. Consistent w ith the status quo hypotheses, traditionalists were more prone to pola rize the two sides' attitudes and underestimate the book preferences t hey shared with their opponents, and both sides attributed more extrem e convictions to revisionists. Discussion focused on mechanisms relate d to power-related biases.