We propose a theoretical framework for when and why members of dominant groups experience threat and express intolerant attitudes in response to social change. Scholarship on symbolic threat suggests that the detection of intergroup differences in values and norms is sufficient to elicit negative intergroup attitudes. Building on this theory, we argue that the experience of threat is actually shaped by prospective beliefs about difference (i.e., expectations of whether outgroups will assimilate to ingroup norms over time or not). Across two studies and two accompanying pilots, we show how outgroup assimilation expectation shapes dominant groups’ experiences of threat, specifically as it relates to their ability to define the norms of their superordinate category (prototypicality threat). We observe that members of dominant groups are surprisingly tolerant of both social change and intergroup difference in the present, so long as they expect outgroup assimilation in the future.
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