When a majority becomes a minority: Essentialist intergroup stereotyping in an inverted power differential

Abstract

This study is on the relationship between a dominant nominal Lithuanian majority and a Polish minority in regions with either a straight dominance of the majority or with a high proportion of minority members, who outnumber the national majority. Compared to ‘normal’ regions, the latter situation creates an inverted power differential that we expect to have an impact on how the two groups essentialize their own and the other group’s ethnic identity, how they stereotype the out-group and how they cope with the perceived change in power balance by more or less disparaging the others. We analysed the discourse in eight focus group discussions with members of both groups comprising a total of 66 participants. As expected, the nominal minority exhibited a tendency to self-essentialize more than the majority in general. Members of the Lithuanian majority that was locally outnumbered by the minority also self-essentialized but to a lesser degree and additionally used marked arguments of in-group favouritism at the Poles’ expense in their discourse. Members of the unambiguous majority were the most ‘politically correct’ participants by conspicuously favouring a non-generalising and anti-essentialist conversation. The findings are discussed in terms of inter-group relations and implications for politics.

Keywords

Minority majority stereotyping psychological essentialism ethnic identity Lithuanians Poles double minorities inverted power

‘Lithuania and Lithuanians are a miracle. We always survive! Look at our history, look at our fate: we survived by fighting and spilling our blood. We all have it in our blood’ exclaimed Jonas, a Lithuanian living in a district of Lithuania where his group constitutes the local minority. Jonas attributes being a ‘miracle’ and having survival abilities to all Lithuanians. By doing this, Jonas demonstrates essentialist thinking: all Lithuanians are alike, because ‘being Lithuanian’ is inscribed in their blood. Jonas’ utterance is a good example of how people tend to speak about groups in an emotional, all-encompassing and essentializing way, leaving no space for finer distinctions. No doubt that this has implications for real-life intergroup relations.

This paper focuses on the relationship between a dominant nominal Lithuanian majority and a politically weaker Polish speaking minority in a real-life context. There are regions with a high proportion of minority members, significantly outnumbering majority members. Compared to ‘normal’ regions, this situation creates an inverted power differential and double minority that we expect to have an impact on how the two groups essentialize their own and the other group’s ethnic identity, how they stereotype the out-group and how they cope with the perceived change in power balance by disparaging or not the others.

Essentialist beliefs serve psychological and social needs

The concept of psychological essentialism (Medin & Ortony, 1989) describes the idea that certain objects are endowed with an invisible substance that unequivocally determines their category membership. Applied to social categories, essentialism is defined as the belief that members of a particular social group share a fixed underlying nature, or essence. Such an internal, invisible essence can be expressed, for example, by talking about ‘blood’ or – nowadays – ‘genes’ shared by group members (Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2011; Wagner, Holtz, & Kashima, 2009). It is imagined to determine both inner and hidden properties as well as phenotype and behaviours of category members. Essentialism constitutes ‘natural kind beliefs’, combining ideas of naturalness, immutability of group membership, discreteness and historical stability, and ‘entitativity’, combining elements of uniformity, underlying similarity with a certain inductive potential and determining identity (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000).

Essentialism has been discussed as an explanatory framework for inter-group perception (Yzerbyt, Judd, & Corneille, 2004). On one hand, essentialism bears a cognitive function, simplifying complex social experiences and making them comprehensible. On the other hand, essentialism also obtains a moral function justifying and legitimizing thoughts, feelings and actions as well as social inequalities and thereby serving political purposes (Verkuyten, 2003; Wagner et al., 2009; Yzerbyt, Rogier, & Fiske, 1998). Therefore, essentialist thinking creates frames for prejudiced behaviour, racism and dehumanization. For example, attributing inheritable and unchanging features to ethnic groups (Aryans as white-skinned, beautiful and creative; Jews as black-haired, destructive, etc.) helped to ‘justify’ German rule over Jews, Roma and Slavs in Nazi times, which led to the Holocaust. However, for politically motivated groups such as feminists and anti-racist movements, the use of ‘strategic essentialism’ can be a tool in striving for social change (Morton, Hornsey, & Postmes, 2009; Wagner et al., 2009).

Psychological essentialism is a constitutive part of stereotyping (e.g. Yzerbyt, Rocher, & Schadron, 1997; Yzerbyt et al., 2004, 1998). Stereotyping means to project a series of attributes indiscriminately upon all members of a group and to assume an underlying essence of all members that is ‘causally’ responsible for its shared characteristics. Rejecting a group’s underlying essence should help to prevent gross stereotyping (Bastian & Haslam, 2006). That is that ‘perceivers bridge the gap from the observation of some group features to the inference of socially shared deep characteristics’ (Yzerbyt, Corneille, & Estrada, 2001, p. 144). For computer games, for example, Monson (2012) demonstrates how racial stereotypes as a form of biological essentialism are mirrored in the games’ imaginary worlds. Therefore, identifying the particular way of stereotyping in conversations and discourse about groups allows one to infer the speaker’s implicit essentialism.

Psychological essentialism and ethnic majority–minority relationships

Social groups in societies are situated in an asymmetrical relationship such that majorities in most cases have higher social status, better access to resources and greater control over institutions than minorities (Staerklé, Sidanius, Green, & Molina, 2005). Even though there do exist dominant minorities, in the majority most cases groups that are small in size relative to the out-group and have less power are most prone to perceiving their group as being under threat (Schaller & Abeysinghe, 2006). As a rule, low power groups perceive higher levels of threat from high power groups than vice versa (Corenblum & Stephan, 2001; Stephan, Ybarra, & Morrison, 2009). Under some conditions, perceptions of threat may also be high when the in-group and out-group are believed to be relatively equal in power which makes them evenly matched opponents in competing for resources (Esses, Dovidio, Jackson, & Armstrong, 2001).

In coping with chronically threatened social identities, members of subordinate minority groups may have more salient in-group identities and sense of vulnerability (Schaller & Abeysinghe, 2006), experience distinctiveness threat (Kronberger & Wagner, 2007), express stronger levels of in-group favouritism and display more out-group bias than do members of dominant groups (Leach, Spears, Branscombe, & Doosje, 2003).

Psychological essentialism plays an important role for social identities not only in general but particularly so for ethnic minority groups (Verkuyten, 2005). This is due to their position in society, where their culture and language could easily be absorbed by the majority. Consequently, it is in the minority’s interest to assume an essentialized image of themselves and of their culture to counteract assimilation, protect group identity, bolster self-esteem and lend support for the groups’ values (Levy, Chiu, & Hong, 2006). Ethnic minority members, for example, endorse self-essentialization if they emphasize their ethnic identity in the context of multiculturalism and de-essentialize themselves when they feel threatened (Holtz, Wagner, & Sartawi, 2015; Howarth, Wagner, Magnussen, & Sammut, 2014; Verkuyten, 2003; Verkuyten & Brug, 2004). US-American Jews, for example, put a high value on their identification as a group, even when they attach little value to religion, and emphasize their genetic – hence essentialist – uniqueness (Tenenbaum & Davidman, 2007). Such essentializing tendencies give rise to, and are at the root of the notion of ‘miscegenation’ and fear of mixing of ethnic groups (Holtz & Wagner, 2009; Wagner et al., 2010).

The members of majority groups, who consider themselves as being higher in status than minorities, develop a sense of ownership of the nation. For example, they tend to have higher levels of xenophobia (Staerklé et al., 2005). At the same time the members of advantaged majority groups often experience relatively strong normative pressures to avoid being seen as prejudiced or discriminatory (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1986). Therefore, in order to avoid being labelled as xenophobes but still being able to reject immigrants, majority members resort to avoiding a direct vocabulary of prejudice and instead talk about essential differences in culture and the genetic makeup of out-groups and the in-group (Yildiz & Verkuyten, 2012). Hence, out-group essentialization is higher with ethnic majority than minority members and in-group essentialization is higher with minority than majority members. In effect, the two groups’ out-group perception reflects each others’ self-essentialization (Wagner et al., 2016).

Consequently, members of groups are not only passive ‘administrators’ of their ethnic or other identity but also engage in ‘essence politics’. When in a disadvantaged position, groups and their leaders will start to show an interest in changing unhelpful stereotypes projected upon them by developing more or less essentialized features of identity that reject the stereotype, which can be called ‘essence politics’ (Morton et al., 2009; Verkuyten, 2003; Wagner et al., 2009; Wagner et al., 2016).

We expect ‘essence politics’ particularly in situations where the relative positioning of a nominal majority and minority is unclear or even reversed as in the present study. If a nominal majority group is relegated to the position of a numerical minority in a particular region, it may well behave like any other minority and feel the need to emphasize their identity in an attempt to preserve their distinctiveness.

The setting of the study: Lithuanians and Lithuanian Poles

Lithuanian Poles constitute 6.6% of the Lithuanian population and are the biggest minority group. They are concentrated within the capital Vilnius (urban area) and in the Vilnius region (rural area). In some far-out rural towns and villages, the density of Poles is as high as 80%, making them the local majority and the Lithuanians the local minority (Statistics Lithuania, 2013). This majority–minority switch is not only numerical but is also reflected in power relationships: in the Polish-dominated areas (Vilnius district and Šalčininkai district) 70–88% of Local Governmental Councils are ruled by Polish political parties, which officially represent ethnic minorities (Lithuanian Chief Electoral Committee, 2015). In these areas, 55–75% of children attend Polish minority language schools (Salcininkai, 2011). Lithuanians in these areas report being discriminated against by Poles, predominantly by a lower support of Lithuanian than Polish schools (Pileckas, 2004) and restricted possibilities to use the Lithuanian language (Lithuanian State Language Commission, 2014). Generally, in the rural region there are intense political fights for the local government and also fights for bilingual kindergartens and schools. Both sides accuse the other of ignorance and blame each other of not providing enough education opportunities (Kazėnas, Jakubauskas, Gaižauskaitė, Kacevičius, & Visockaitė, 2014).

In their country Lithuanians and Lithuanian Poles appear to be in minority and/or majority positions, depending on the region. Both the Lithuanians and Poles in certain rural areas become ambiguous minority–majority groups or ‘double minority’. On the one hand, the Poles in rural areas could position themselves as the local majority, having the local government speak their language and represent their interests. On the other hand, Poles in such areas may identify with the national minority and feel discriminated against and threatened by national legislation. Similarly, Lithuanians in these rural areas could be positioned as the local minority facing discrimination and having limited power and control in everyday matters, or classified as being part of the national majority.

Lithuanian Poles in Lithuania do not speak the Polish language as spoken in Poland, but a dialect version of it: Some words are ‘borrowed’ from Lithuanian, Russian and Belorussian and the pronunciation is somewhat different from that of Poles in Poland. There are also many Lithuanian Polish people, speaking the ‘local’ language, consisting of a mixture of Polish, Russian and Lithuanian. Also, there are some Lithuanian Poles who don’t speak Lithuanian at all (Daukšas, 2012). Some Lithuanians use the language peculiarities of Lithuanian Poles as proof of ‘bad integration’ of Lithuanian Poles (Kazėnas et al., 2014, p. 84). Lithuanians themselves use different dialects of their language in different regions (Nevinskaitė, 2013, p. 68).

Lithuanians and Poles are tied by a long common history, intertwined with conflicts, hatred and tension. In 2011, this tension was intensified by a series of political changes, expanding the number of subjects to be taught in Lithuanian minority schools and rejecting a proposal that would have allowed using non-Lithuanian characters in name spelling. These changes increased the resistance, debates and protests of Lithuanian Poles, which were interpreted as disloyalty to the Lithuanian state. According to Pilininkaitė-Sotirovič and Žibas (2011), in 2011 Lithuanians expressed much stronger negative attitudes towards Poles than in 2010. The Poles became one of the least esteemed social groups, on par with Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Method

We chose focus groups because this method allows exploring socially shared beliefs and lay explanations of social phenomena in an interactive situation. Focus groups also provide information about different kinds of dynamic interdependencies among participants who hold diverse positions when elaborating socially shared knowledge (Marková, Linell, Grossen, & Orvig, 2007; cf. also Stephenson, Kniveton & Wagner, 1991).

In August and September 2011, 66 people took part in eight focus group discussions conducted in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius (urban area with 15–20% of Lithuanian Polish inhabitants) and three smaller towns (Šalčininkai, Eišiškės and Baltoji Vokė with 70–90% of Lithuanian Polish inhabitants). There were two discussions with every kind of ethnic constellation (urban Lithuanians, urban Lithuanian Poles, rural Lithuanians, rural Lithuanian Poles). The participants were recruited by contacting local organizations (libraries, governmental offices, Lithuanian Polish organizations). In each discussion there were between five and nine participants (aged 17–54, mostly 21–35), mixed by gender. Considering that some parts of the conversation could be ‘hot’ and threatening because of the current political climate (Grudens-Schuck, Allen, & Larson, 2004) and in an attempt to defuse tension, we chose participants who knew each other.

The discussions lasted 50–110 min. All group discussions were moderated by the first author being an ethnic Lithuanian. She encouraged participants to engage in discussion with each other, emphasizing that personal opinion was respected. While moderating group discussions with Lithuanian Poles, she underlined that participants could freely choose the language in which they would like to speak (Lithuanian, Polish or Russian) because she and all discussion participants could understand all three languages.

At the beginning of each discussion, the investigator introduced herself and let participants introduce themselves, telling their name and talking about their hobbies. After the introduction, the participants were presented with stimulus material. Each participant received a piece of paper with four pictures: (1) Lithuanian nationalists in a procession; (2) three girls holding both Lithuanian and Polish flags; (3) Lithuanian Poles protesting at the Lithuanian President’s house and (4) a statue of Adam Mickiewicz, a famous poet who identified both with Lithuanian and Polish cultures.

These pictures were often used in popular media at the time of the conflict symbolizing the two ethnic groups and their interests. The visual stimuli were chosen to elicit discussion, to sensitize participants to the political nature of the research and to connect the ‘representations of the past to the social identities of the here and now’ (Sen & Wagner, 2009, p. 308).

During the discussions, participants were asked to describe what they saw in the pictures and what they thought about the things presented in them. Talking about the pictures provided a similar starting point in all discussions and initiated dispute about ethnic issues without the investigator’s input. Additionally, the moderator brought up questions about essentialist ideas to provoke approval or disproval, such as: ‘does a Lithuanian differ from a Pole?’, ‘can a Pole become a Lithuanian?’, ‘can a Lithuanian become a Pole?’, ‘what is this thing that makes you a Lithuanian/Pole?’.

After each discussion participants had the opportunity to say some final words. At the end participants were debriefed about the aims of the research and dismissed. All the discussions were tape-recorded and transcribed. The names of participants were anonymized. In the extracts below, excluded material is marked by angle brackets <…>; added words appear inside such brackets.

Qualitative analysis

The transcriptions of the focus group discussions were explored for the diverse ways in which the participants expressed essentialist attitudes and ethnic minority–majority stereotyping. We used a directive approach (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) and ‘deductive category application’ to organize the data in a way that is meaningful for our theoretical perspective (Mayring, 2000). The aspects of analysis were theoretically derived and formulated a priori.

We used ‘fragments’ as units of analysis. A fragment is an idea, which lasts until the next turn of ideas. The fragments were of varying length, some only a part of a sentence and some embracing a part of group discussion with 10 sentences.

In the first phase of analysis, we identified fragments where participants spoke about their ethnic identities and/or expressed essentialist ideas. Any sort of generalizing stereotype about in- and out-groups was coded as essentialist as was any entitative talk about groups (‘we all’ or ‘they all’). Examples of statements that were coded as essentialist: ‘they have it inborn’, ‘they are like this’, ‘they all do it in this way’, ‘they are like this because they have it in their hearts’.

During the second phase of analysis, we focused on concrete utterances, which appeared in fragments that were categorized before. Sometimes participants expressed general essentialist ideas about social groups, but didn’t provide any specific examples, such as ‘I believe that some groups of people have something inborn, but I don’t know, I cannot tell you how’. Quite often, though, participants supplemented their general essentialist idea with in-group or out-group related examples. These accounts could refer to feelings of discrimination and/or be expressions of in-group favouritism to justify their generalizations. An essentialist utterance could refer to the in-group or to the out-group.

In other places, the respondents’ utterances were not clear cut essentializing in the aforementioned sense. We separated these utterances into three groups: Anti-essentialist, non-essentialist and out-group disparaging notions. ‘Anti-essentialism’ was categorized if a participant rejected general essentialist notions, opposing essentialist ideas or explicitly denied a natural, discrete, necessary, historically stable, personally unalterable stereotypical feature of a group mentioned by another discussion participant. These are ‘examples in the discussion, where cultural essentialism is explicitly criticized and rejected’ (Verkuyten, 2003, p. 378), for instance ‘you are not right, the Poles are not more religious than Lithuanians, it is rather related to the location of the church’, ‘I don’t see the difference in the facial features of Lithuanians and Poles’, ‘this is not true that Poles are more nationalist than Lithuanians, it depends on the person, there are good and bad people everywhere’.

‘Non-essentialism’ was categorized if participants spontaneously talked about features and human nature that applied to members of several categories simultaneously and implied permeable boundaries of group membership. For example ‘there is no difference, we are all people’; ‘it doesn’t matter what ethnicity you are born with’.

Utterances coded as ‘out-group disparagement’ reflected devaluing ideas when one group depicted the other as of little worth or lacking (Poles being ‘uneducated’ or not being ‘real Poles’, ‘Lithuanians know fewer languages than Poles’ ‘Lithuanians are bad Christians’, etc.).

From the total of 887 fragments that were coded, 10% were coded independently by a second researcher to calculate inter-rater reliability. Cohen’s kappa was 0.81, which is quite satisfactory (Smith, 2000).

Findings

Quantitative comparison

For an overview of the findings we cross-tabulated the category counts and ethnic belonging (Table 1). The two focus groups with the same ethnic composition were pooled for the present purpose. Essentialist attributions of Lithuanians about Poles and vice versa were categorized as ‘out-group essentialism’, excluding paragraphs where participants essentialized some other group or where they ascribed it to both, the in- and out-group.

Table 1.

Cross-tabulation of essentialist attributions and coded categories appearing in the same paragraph by ethnic groups by location.

	N	In-group essentialism	Out-group essentialism	Feelings of discrimination by out-group	In-group favouritism	Non- essentialism	Out-group disparagement	Anti- essentialism
Rural Poles in the position of a local majority	15	14	7	3	10	3	4	9
Rural Lithuanians in the position of a local minority	23	9	14	10	13	8	8	7
Urban Poles as nominal and numerical minority	14	11	9	5	7	2	5	7
Urban Lithuanians as nominal and numerical majority	18	5	8	5	2	6	8	16
Sum	70	39	38	23	32	19	25	39
Chi-square		19.85	2.02	2.56	9.42	2.58	1.14	14.28
P		.001	n. s.	n. s.	.024	n. s.	n. s.	.003

In accordance with other findings that minorities have more reason to construct an essentialized identity than majorities, Poles attribute ethnic essentialism more often to themselves than Lithuanians do to their identity. Rural Lithuanians, though, recognize the Pole’s essentializing tendency and mirror it in their out-group essence attribution. Hand in hand goes a pronounced in-group favouritism by rural Lithuanians, with rural Poles exhibiting this slightly less so.

There is no difference between rural and urban groups in using non-essentialized speech. Both urban and rural Lithuanians show a slight tendency to disparage the Polish minority, which, at least with rural Lithuanians – the nominal majority locally outnumbered by Poles – is associated with feelings of being discriminated against.

Urban Lithuanians show a strong tendency to use anti-essentialist talk. This shows a higher level of reflection with urban members of the nominal majority or may also indicate that their ethnic position and distinctiveness is not endangered as it is in the case of rural Lithuanians. Let us exemplify these results with some illustrative excerpts from the group discussions in the following sections.

Self- and mutual attribution of essence in a situation of reversed power

In extract 1 rural Poles speak about becoming a Lithuanian Pole. Participants C and D share ideas that ‘being a Pole’ is inborn, written ‘in your genes’. This condition cannot be changed, because ‘you are what you are born’. Therefore, discreteness, immutability and natural basis are attributed to the ethnic categories. Furthermore, participant C states that ‘Slavs cannot learn the Lithuanian language because of their genes’, a hint towards the inductive potential of an attributed essence: the behaviour of Lithuanian Slav minority members (some Lithuanian Poles and Russians don’t speak Lithuanian) is explained by presuming a causal primacy of inborn features: they cannot learn the Lithuanian language because of their Slavic genes. In general, Lithuanian Poles are often blamed by Lithuanians for being unable to learn the Lithuanian language, and this inability may function as a threat to their ethnic identity. By attributing this inability to inborn features, participant C justifies this incapacity and constructs her ethnic identity in a positive way. The other participants (B, A and D) support her position and positive identity construction.

Extract 1 (rural Poles, group 7):

Moderator: Where does this ‘being a Pole’ come from?

C: I think it’s in your genes.

D:…yes, yes…

C:…haven’t you noticed, the Russians and most of the Slavs don’t know and cannot learn Lithuanian? So why? I think it is in their genes.

Moderator: Do you all think so?

B: Probably.

A: Yes, probably.

C: I think it is something inborn.

D: I think you are what you are born.

In extract 2 rural Lithuanians take essentialism one step further. First, the participants allude to essentialist notions like feeling, having in your heart and acknowledging your identity (Participants G and C) while others dampen their enthusiasm by doubting the value of ‘pure blood’. Hence, in this group a romantic image of identity meets quasi-scientific rejection of romanticism by participants E and F. Unwittingly, however, by using terms like ‘mixed blood’ and ‘impurity’ even E and F presuppose the existence of something like an essence with their words. Usually these terms are understood as negative as they threaten the distinctiveness of the group, but participant F gives it a twist by explaining that ‘mixed blood’ may be a good thing. Therefore, in the context of this extract, rural Lithuanians protect their in-group identity essence in an indirect way by amending it with the idea of ethnic mixing being a good condition.

Extract 2 (rural Lithuanians, group 6):

C: You are a real Lithuanian if you feel it in your heart.

G:…the one who thinks he is Lithuanian and can acknowledge it…

C: If someone would start analysing your mother’s and father’s blood…

E: It’s not about blood; this impurity is not the main aspect.

F: It is proven that it wouldn’t be good if we all were pure-blood Lithuanians. It is bad when the same blood is mixing over and over again, look at Iceland, it is a small island and there are so many freaks.

These two excerpts from the group discussions illustrate how Lithuanians and Poles use different versions of essentialist ideas when speaking about their ethnic identities. Ethnic Poles, as the nominal minority, tend to attribute in-group essentialism to their in-group even in a situation of local numerical majority. Lithuanians, who take the position of a numerical minority here, also show an interest in asserting their identity by using an essentializing strategy that is not straightforward but involves a twist in re-defining the value of mixing. This helps them to maintain their distinctiveness in a numerical minority position. Hence, in-group essentialism serves to protect a distinct ethnic identity even in reversed minority–majority situations. However, in-group favouritism is distributed differently in urban and rural areas.

Symbolic in-group favouritism: A corollary of minority essentialism

As shown before rural Lithuanians and Poles in the present focus group conversations show a marked interest to self-essentialize. Hand in hand with this goes a tendency to favour the in-group, albeit on different levels with the Polish and Lithuanian numerical minority. While rural Lithuanians in the situation of power reversal complain about what they see as the unjust preferential treatment of local Poles, the Poles themselves boast about what they see as their achievement as illustrated by extract 3.

This is from a group of Poles speaking about their attitudes about Lithuanians. Participant G notes that Poles in the capital are wealthier than Lithuanians in rural areas, so Lithuanians are jealous. Participant I supports this position, attributing jealousy to Lithuanians because of the financial support the Lithuanian Poles receive from Poland. Following this, participant G adds that Poles are more successful in the labour market than Lithuanians and know many languages, while Lithuanians don’t even know Lithuanian and are jealous because of that. By doing this, the Lithuanian Polish participants attribute positive features (good skills in three languages, economic welfare) to themselves and negative features (bad skills in even the mother tongue; being poor and jealous) to the out-group. This favours the in-group at the expense of the out-group. The positive feature (good language skills) of the in-group is strengthened by the generalization ‘we all’. Similarly, repeatedly mentioning that Lithuanians are ‘jealous’ and using the words ‘they all’ demonstrates the attribution of entitativity to the Lithuanian out-group. The rhetorical devices of essentialist attributions in line with in-group favouritism bolster the group participants’ self-esteem as the nominal minority.

Extract 3 (urban Poles, group 5):

G: People live worse in the rural districts, worse than we do here in Vilnius, so the Lithuanians living there are jealous of us, jealous that we live better than they do.

I: They are also jealous because of the <financial> support we get from Poland…

G: Because in the labour market, we all know at least three languages, but look at Lithuanians – in some regions they don’t even know Lithuanian themselves – so they all are simply jealous.

Lithuanians of the local numerical minority take refuge in self-aggrandizement by ‘symbolic’ in-group favouritism to counter the threat of being dominated to a certain degree. They experience the Poles’ dominant positioning in their region on a daily basis and seek relief by labelling them as morally inferior to themselves. In extract 4 speakers A and D verbosely complain about Poles discriminating against the Lithuanian language and bullying them on other occasions. Speakers C, A and D develop this theme in unison by contrasting Lithuanians’ politeness and tolerance to the Poles’ alleged two-facedness, nationalism and unwillingness to integrate.

Extract 4 (rural Lithuanians, group 6)

A: The Poles here, if we can call them Poles, sometimes they do some unkind things, I have suffered myself, like I go to a shop here and ask the salesgirl for something in Lithuanian, and the other customer tells me, “why are you speaking Lithuanian, this is not the way to speak here …”

D: I could not imagine a Lithuanian saying something like this to a Pole; we are much more tolerant, sometimes maybe even too much …

C: the Poles are like this, they are two-faced, they are nationalist, the things they do with us here…

A: they are against us, they bully us, some of them would never come to drink coffee with us…

D: we Lithuanians are also spread all around the world, but we never would try to create our own country in another state, maybe we are somewhat too reserved, but we respect the law.

A similar theme also appears in Lithuanians’ discourses in the urban focus group 1, when Poles are accused of ‘not being real Poles’, explaining that the identity of Lithuanian Poles is based on political reasons, rather than on bloodline. Thus, by withholding their Polish identity from them the discussant applies a naturalizing and essentialist vocabulary such as ‘real Poles’ and lack of ‘Polish relatives’. Also Poles’ stereotypical features and distinct shared characteristics are attributed globally, which is a clear form of essentialism.

In focus group 8, the urban Lithuanians use a series of arguments disparaging Poles as not working, depending on welfare and not appreciating what the Lithuanian state does for them to justify depriving them of their right to exist in the country. Instead the region they live in should be given to Belarus. This style demonstrates the majority members’ positioning as being higher in social status and being in control of the minority.

Rhetorical anti-essentialism: Urban Lithuanian sensibility

Among all focus groups, urban Lithuanians showed a marked sensibility for ‘political correctness’ in rejecting outright essentialism and emphasizing entitativity of groups. In extract 5 speaker A starts off by justifying the essential uniqueness of their ethnic group due to genetic isolation and endogamous procreation. Three other participants take up this notion and immediately reject A’s suggestion by referring to the necessary ethnic mixing having happened during the millennia of history. B even requests respect for other groups and positions him or herself as morally superior.

Extract 5 (urban Lithuanians, group 1):

A: we were genetically isolated and we differ from the rest of the world. We are the second highest nation in the world …

I: I don’t think so, we are so mixed up with Germans and Slavs and Normans and Mongols that you can hardly find any genetically pure Lithuanian

F: we are not different from others

B: I don’t care about our height, it matters for me that we become tolerant and speak respectfully about other groups

The tension between an easy cognitive closure by using essentialist arguments when talking about ethnic groups and maintaining a balanced view without too much stereotyping is also reflected in extract 6. While speakers B and I underline their ability to recognize whether a person is Lithuanian or Polish by their facial features, C and G contradict and try to change the track of the argument.

Extract 6 (urban Lithuanians, group 1):

B: I was living in London and I could easily differentiate a Lithuanian from a Pole from their appearance

I: yes, the facial features, the noses are different…

C: I don’t know, I think all the Eastern-Europeans look similar, there is no actual difference.

G: And our languages sound the same to the English people.

This excerpt nicely reflects the rational and reflected stance that many urban Lithuanians take.

Discussion

Versions of majority–minority positions and their psychological implications

Let’s start the discussion with a word of caution: Majority–minority relationships are an increasingly relevant issue in modern societies given global migration patterns and recent history in Europe. The end of the Soviet Union, for example, has left the Baltic States with Russian-speaking minorities that need to be recognized as full citizens. This is just a minor example of different ethnic groups and language speakers composing European states. There is evidence that some ethnic minorities in different countries react in specific ways towards the majority culture that differ significantly from others in coping with their status. Consequently, we cannot be sure that the present findings can be generalized to all or many other majority–minority relationships even though evidence points to Lithuanian Poles being rather ‘typical’ in their behaviour towards the majority culture (Ehala & Vedernikova, 2015).

This study explores the use of psychological essentialism as a tool in intergroup relations. The locale of the focus group research is Lithuania where a Lithuanian-speaking majority lives together with a Polish-speaking minority that is unevenly distributed across the country. We analysed the discourse unfolding in the discussions with regard to self-identity-related essentialism and mutual essentialist stereotyping in places where a straight majority–minority relationship prevailed, such as in cities and in rural areas where this relationship was reversed due to a local numerical predominance of the minority Poles.

Turning first to the situation of straight Lithuanian majority and Polish minority relations, the nominal minority showed a remarkable tendency to speak about themselves in an entitative way, encoding an essentialist view. For urban as well as rural Poles, this may help to maintain a marked Polish ethnic identity and has been shown in earlier research (e.g. Morton et al., 2009; Verkuyten, 2003). The motivation to be essentialist about oneself may be either a resistance to assimilation, constructing a positive self-image (Levy et al., 2006) or responding to a perceived political threat by the majority (Corenblum & Stephan, 2001; Esses et al., 2001). In the light of our material, the latter appears less plausible, because Poles tended to even boast about their well-off arrangement in terms of political and financial security that, according to their opinion, contrasts with the Lithuanians’ situations and is expressed in their jealousy. In a way, the Poles’ discourse seems to play the tune of dual identity: On the one hand, preserving and underlining their ethnic and linguistic identity while on the other hand positioning themselves as equal to the majority. This is somewhat similar to UK Muslims playing their religion and simultaneously assuming their position within British mainstream society (Hopkins, 2011).

The discourse of members of the Lithuanian majority differs remarkably across situations. Urban Lithuanians who are unambiguous in their majority position, mostly maintain a rational and relatively reflected style of conversation about other groups, even though, of course, entitativity covertly lurks in any form of communication about other groups (Kashima et al., 2010). There are many text fragments where focus group members project the image of dominant Lithuanians as being tolerant and open-minded. This is an attempt of the advantaged majority to reject accusations of prejudice and discrimination against the minority (e.g. Dovidio & Gaertner, 1986); but, of course, the identity of the urban Lithuanian majority is less threatened than that of other groups.

Turning to the situation in rural areas where the positioning of the minorities is numerically reversed, we see that Lithuanians mimic the argumentation of their Polish compatriots in a certain respect. As their secure position as a majority becomes questioned, they put more emphasis on their ‘Lithuanian-ness’ than their urban ‘brethren’ and self-ascribe a series of positive identity traits that urban Lithuanians have no reason to appeal to. Also in contrast to urban Lithuanians, they seem to have a more acute perception of the Poles’ self-essentialization, which they reflect in their statements about the out-group. In their conversations they are concerned with contrasting the out-group’s negative stereotype with their own positive attributes. This goes as far as mentioning the advantage of their being genetically mixed.

Instead of over-emphasizing their ethnic essence, Lithuanians in a numerical minority competing with Poles complement their identity construction by devaluing the out-group and thereby establishing a positive contrast with their self-image (Leach et al., 2003). Self-aggrandizement at the out-group’s expense was frequently mentioned together with situations where a participant has felt competition with and discrimination by Poles. Given the high incidence of discriminating experiences mentioned, we conclude that they are acutely aware of nominally being part of the ‘ruling’ majority in Lithuania, while in daily life the nominally ‘weaker’ Poles position themselves as political, ethnic and linguistic ‘rulers’. They mention feelings of competition with Poles, which appears to strain their self-image (cf. Esses et al., 2001).

This awareness marks a clear psychological difference to ‘normal’ minorities who, besides attempts at dual identity (Hopkins, 2011), may not feel the same tension of shifting power relations as numerical minorities. The present response pattern is in line with an experimental finding where members of a group that were supposedly outnumbered in one frame of reference exhibited more demonizing, negative and more malevolent stereotypes of a competing out-group than when not being outnumbered (Schaller & Abeysinghe, 2006). In our opinion, the difference between nominal and numerical minorities in coping with their social positioning reflects particular ways of doing ‘essence politics’ in the service of preserving a positive self-image (Wagner et al., 2009; Wagner et al., 2016).

There is one reservation which we want to point out: It could be that some of the discursive differences that rural relative to urban Lithuanians show are due to a lower level of schooling and not so much to their political status. However, this argument would also apply to rural Poles who live in the same villages and share in the same educational resources. Consequently, the findings are unlikely to be biased because of education differentials.

Implications for politics

The present study has some implications for politically dealing with minority–majority issues particularly when they become more complex with changing relative power and numerical ratios. It may be hard to find a full minority–majority switch in real life. In the national context, majorities are strongly controlling legislation issues, granting minorities just enough rights to satisfy federal rules. Of course, minorities can possess even more power in a region as was the case in our study. Given this, the partial minority–majority inversion will imply perceptions of injustice by the outnumbered majority even if there may be a relatively equal distribution of power. The nominal majority usually do not perceive a level field of competition as just, but as a threat to their ‘deserved’ status of nominal dominance (Esses et al., 2001).

The psychological ramifications of this – such as reified identities and fierce stereotypes – are manifold as we have shown in this study. How politics can deal with such givens depends very much on a country’s democratic structure: That is the form of the federal constitution, the historical background of the situation and the habitual stance of the minority towards acculturation (Ehala & Vedernikova, 2015). Establishing bilingual schools and administration structures in the region comes to mind, as well as a special attention to mediating between communities in school history teaching (e.g. Kello, 2016). In the long run, a critical and multi-perspective method of history teaching may prove to be the remedy of choice notwithstanding the misgiving that nationalist parties and people are likely to boycott.

Conclusion

The present study highlights the importance of local contexts in majority–minority relationships such as when the population structure in a country differs between regions. In such settings ‘straight’ and ‘reversed’ minority–majority relations can be found that have social psychological consequences for the members of the respective groups. We found evidence, for example, that the people’s self-attributions and other attributions of group essences in such ‘reversed’ regions differ from ‘straight’ constellations, underlining the importance of psychological essentialism in psychological inquiries of intergroup relationships.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

The authors thank the association ‘Vilniaus miesto valkatų klubas’ for their help organizing discussions with Lithuanian Poles and to Raimonda Vengrytė for assisting with the coding process.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Johannes Kepler University scholarship for research abroad.

Author biographies

Ruta Zeromskyte is PhD student at Johannes Kepler University, Linz. Her PhD thesis is on the dynamics of essentialism and ethnic identity.

Wolfgang Wagner is retired professor of social psychology at Johannes Kepler University, Linz. His interests are in theory and research on societal psychology, social and cultural knowledge, popularisation of science, racism, and social representation theory. Besides the book “Everyday Discourse and Common Sense” (2005, with Nicky Hayes) he published more than 150 scholarly books and papers. [].

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