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How does social class affect people’s goals in social interactions? A rank-based perspective suggests actors from higher social classes (compared to lower social classes) have more agentic and less communal goals when interacting with same class or unspecified others. Focusing on targets’ social class, an identity-based perspective suggests the reverse: Actors should more strongly endorse communal (agentic) goals toward illegitimately lower class (higher class) compared to illegitimately higher class (lower class) targets, regardless of actors’ own social class. Three preregistered experiments (N = 2,023) manipulated actor’s social class and the nature of the target (illegitimately higher/lower class, same class, unspecified) and measured participants’ goals in imagined interactions using the Circumplex Scales of Intergroup Goals. The identity-based perspective received strong support: Across studies, actors expressed stronger agentic (communal) goals toward higher class (lower class) targets. The rank-based perspective received limited support, with relatively low-class (vs. relatively high-class) actors expressing stronger communal goals toward same-class targets.
Members of conflicting groups experience threats to different identity dimensions, resulting in the need to restore the aspect of identity that was threatened. Do these needs translate into specific goals in social interactions? In the present research, we examined the hypotheses that (1) experiencing one’s ingroup as illegitimately disadvantaged or victimized arouses agentic goals (to act and appear assertive and confident) when interacting with the advantaged or victimizing group, while (2) experiencing one’s ingroup as illegitimately advantaged or perpetrating transgressions arouses communal goals (to act and appear warm and trustworthy) when interacting with the disadvantaged or victimized group. Study 1 (N = 391) generally supported both hypotheses across diverse intergroup contexts involving gender, national/ethnic, and consumer identities. Study 2 (N = 122) replicated this pattern in a context of occupational identities. Study 2 further showed that the effect of ingroup role on agentic and communal intergroup goals was not moderated by participants’ general dispositional preferences for agentic and communal goals in interpersonal interactions, thus demonstrating how ingroup role exerts a distinct and robust influence on goals for interactions with other groups. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.