A Social Reflex: Police and Blacks, Seeing Threat, Close Ranks
This article gives information about the research that sociologists are conducting in terms of relationships and connections within and between different groups. Many people were offended and triggered by the killing of Philando Castile in Minnesota even though they did not witness or physically experience the incident. Sociologists tried to analyze this phenomenon using the intergroup threat theory, which analyses the factors that can bring threat to certain groups. When groups of individuals confront threats, their relationships within the group and between groups can shift due to this external “shock.” This phenomenon begins to appear more frequently as people are said to be “more connected” with the invention of modern technologies.
It is mentioned in the article that groups tend to feel better toward individuals within the same group that they belong to and feel animosity toward the other groups that they are not part of. Since “threats deepen internal group identity and cohesion,” we are able to see the different forms of connections being categorized in different levels as we discussed in class. When an African American man faces injustice, the people who are able to identify themselves with the man empathise with him and therefore creates a connection. The nodes are the individuals in this situation and the edges are connections between the individuals. When the empathizing people are deciding their relationships with the people who are not in their group, they are more likely to have an enemy type of connection with them during sensitive times. If we take a look at this in a larger context, we can see that it is similar to the satisfaction to structural balance property where a group of people have positive connections with each other within the group but negative connections with people who belong to a different group when they are facing threat.