The subjective ways of domination

Faced with strong and persistent social inequalities that mark them, societies have to produce a work of continuous justification since, as Max Weber emphasized in its time, no domination can continue because of the raw force … This question of legitimization is addressed by different ways by sociologists and social psychologists. The first will highlight the construction of ideologies, while the disciplinary logic of the latter invites them from the way in which individuals justify their own position and that of their group of belonging in a global context of inequality. But ultimatelythis second approach is quickly convergent with the first, and more extremely heuristic as to a certain number of contemporary debates around inequalities and discrimination. While the approaches to social psychology have trouble disseminating with a large audience, the latest book by the Geneva academic Fabio Lorenzi-Cioldi brings a very convincing illustration.

The author pursues a thesis initiated in particular in 1988 with the publication of Dominant individuals and dominated groupsthen in 2002 with Representations of dominant and dominated groups (two works published at Pug). In twenty years, on this furrow, considerable work has been carried out, taking the form of multiple experiments and conceptual advances, by the author himself but also by a community of specialists who appears very consistent, as the book References of references (including also sociological work) ; The whole is presented with this tone mixing the most picky empiricism and the most juvenile humor that often characterizes social psychologists.

For the not familiar reader of these approaches, it should be remembered that the specificity of social psychology, in relation to psychology, is to emphasize that personal identity is deeply affected by social position: as Lorenzi-Cioldi expresses, “” Personal identity is one of the most completed expressions of belonging to a group (P. 27). He thus underlines the need to take into account the concept of social status (position in a hierarchy, of power relationship) in psychology studies. If this thesis is relatively classic in social psychology (since Tajfel’s analyzes in the early 1970s), the originality of the approach of Lorenzi-Cioldi is to apply (and to test) that this imprint of the group of belonging on Individual psychologies has deeply different modalities depending on whether one is a member of a dominant group or a dominated group. If the dominant group is “ collection “Individuals who think and are considered” Personalities who do not need the group to define themselves “(P. 74), the dominated group works as a” AGGREGATE On the contrary, where personal identities are based, which are assimilated to the very group of which they are interchangeable members.

Thus, the members of the dominant group will be fundamentally individualistic and essentialist: they owe their position to their personal qualities, whether moral or intellectual, and are convinced of being unique personalities, even though an external observer perceives Without difficulty their similarities and everything they owe to their social networks (see for example, in sociology, the analyzes of the big bourgeoisie made by Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot). More generally, it is not only their own situation but the world around them that the dominant will interpret in terms of what social psychologists call the norm of internality: what we have and what we becomes explained by personal qualities and/or factors under its own control ; Conversely, the dominated will more often invoke factors escaping their control as external factors or luck. This very stable observation would result in particular from the role of the school system, which is to internalize the idea that success or failure depends on personal factors, that is what has been called school meritocracy ; The explanations of social inequalities would then be increasingly internal as we are socialized by the school apparatus. Just as sociologists easily show that meritocracy then works as an ideology of dominant, social psychologists (Lorenzi-Cioldi itself but also American colleagues like Sidanius and Pratto) emphasize that these ways of reading reality are “ Legitimators myths », Which participate in the justification and therefore in the maintenance of social inequalities, in particular in racism or sexism, particularly studied by this community of researchers.

These ways of representing yourself and representing others are capital, and the multiple and clever empirical analyzes presented by Fabio Lorenzi-Cioldi lead to a theory of domination: the dominant group is dominant in that it propagates standards And values ​​fully embodied by the only members of the dominant group, but to which the members of the dominated group come up against daily, as soon as they evolve in the same society. The latter are notably confronted with the pretensions of the dominant to represent the best of and to embody the reality of meritocracy and equal opportunities, or even autonomy and self -sufficiency. They can, not without difficulty, not without real suffering sometimes, try to get closer to the cultural ideal imposed by the advantaged groups, but in so doing they also come to subscribe to the ideologies which legitimize the privileged position of these groups and devalue them : “ The insistence with which the dominated are toe by means of stereotypes influences the perception they have of themselves (P. 152). Many works thus show how women adhere to ambient sexism. This is not without consequences: the concept of “ threat of stereotype And its multiple empirical tests show that mobilizing the prevailing stereotypes the most advantaged and disadvantaged them, like self-realizing prophecies. Concretely, the fact of knowingly knowing that given your group of belonging you are supposed to be less successful this or that task induces such pressure that it obeys your chances of actually succeeding in it ; Thus, the pupils girls, in front of an exercise presented as geometry (discipline connoted as male) succeed significantly less well than when the same exercise is presented as drawing.

To return to the heart of the thesis, it clearly appears that the asymmetry between the groups produced, on the side of the dominant a vision of themselves as unique, original but more broadly an individualism which is also a universalism, while the dominated are referred to their particularities and will be tempted to cultivate the “ We Who protects them somehow from others. And Lorenzi-Cioldi to evoke the work on minorities which, on the basis of the socio-cultural differences of groups “ dislodge asymmetry for a more angelic description of irreducible entities and freed from any report (P. 272). We then perceive the dominated as inserted in their culture, to which their individuals are subordinate, while the dominant are obviously freed from it and embody universalism. But these notions of immeasurable cultures (such as female cultures versus male, Westerners versus the Orientals …) which are fundamentally structured by the relationships between the groups and the exaltation of the differences that accompany them can lead to racism and even more surely on an a-historical essentialization of the groups in question ; This confirms, in any case, “ the amnesia of the domination report which assembles them and which enters the representations of each other (P. 287). In other words, social psychology highlights the risks to anchor in “ crops “Specific to the dominated, at the risk of thus maintaining the domination relationship which is largely at the root. She denounces the pitfalls of »A kind of balanced multiculturalism “(P. 287), where respect for” crops So defined comes to reinforce the established social relationships. These questions are obviously controversial. But many sociologists would adhere to the idea that an increasingly culturalist representation of society blurs the perception of relations of domination.

On an undoubtedly less controversial field, Fabio Fabio-Lorenzi emphasizes as a leitmotif that the rise of individualism, the discourse according to which each is the author of his life reflects the perception of the dominants: “ far from indicating the end of groups … (he) embodies the social identity of certain groups (P. 178). This “ Personal drift Who wants to ignore the deep impact that circumstances and contexts have on our attitudes and behaviors is eminently conservative, since it naturalizes social actors as soon as they are classified in a group, as if they were then “” With a reservoir of provisions they will update in all circumstances (P. 290). However, multiple works show that rather than showing expected behaviors as well as male and female everywhere, people act in fact differently depending on the contexts, mixed or non -mixed, according to the social statutes of people in interaction, etc. Fabio Lorenzi-Cioldi also comes up with humor that what constitutes in his eyes a form of psychologization of inter-group relationships is also expressed, in a even more extreme way, by the fascination that cognitive neuroscience exercises on some of his colleagues. These are now interested in stereotypes, social dominance, more broadly in the way in which we categorize others. We are then in search of a biunivia connection between a mental state and an activation of the brain, which will be read as causes inscribed in the body to all psychic phenomena including those which in the eyes of social psychology is clearly related to domination Intergroups. This attractive and modern version of personology then allows “ It is up to the dominant to lay a veil on the relationships between groups and to flee the accusation of arbitrariness of their superiority, which then seems to reside exclusively in their intrinsic qualities … (P. 260-261).

We would not stop listing the relevance of the work cited around this theme of dominant individuals, dominated groups (To use the title of a previous book by Fabio Lorenzi-Cioldi) compared to lively political questions. We regret that the debates are so rare between social psychologists and sociologists who are sometimes, perhaps paradoxically, less determined when the weight of the social context. Because we should obviously debate this balance between objective constraints and subjective visions which co-produce a balance of inequality. The fact remains that this dense and dense book convinces of the undeniable interest that these debates would have, and the multiple political issues of which they would carry.