Abstract
This thesis contributes to the evolving field of privilege studies in New Zealand by investigating awareness of and attitudes towards privilege in a community and university student sample. Privilege perpetuates social inequities by granting unearned advantages to people belonging to powerful and dominant groups in a society, whilst further marginalising people belonging to subordinate groups. Study 1 used a repeated measures design to investigate awareness of class privilege, by examining causal explanations for socio-economic success and failure. In an online study, Pākehā participants were presented with a series of vignettes describing people with either a privileged or underprivileged background and were tasked to identify the main causal factor for their life outcomes. The key finding was that attributions for success varied as a function of background. For targets with a privileged background, success was judged to be more external, stable, and global and less personally controllable, than failure. Whereas for targets with an underprivileged background, attributions for success tended to be more internal, personally controllable, stable, and global, than attributions for failure. These results indicate that participants were aware of the unearned head start provided by privilege, and how childhood background influences present circumstances. Study 2 used a mixed methods design to examine responsivity to a brief social justice intervention aimed at increasing awareness of personal and collective privilege. In an online study, university students were randomly assigned to watch either a video about white privilege or a control video and respond to questionnaires related to their social attitudes and privilege awareness. Participants in the privilege condition reported increased awareness of white privilege, heterosexism, and institutional racism, as well as greater awareness of classism, racial privilege, and racism. Additionally, Study 2 provided preliminary evidence that membership in marginalised groups may both enhance and restrain awareness of privilege, likely through different mechanisms. Together, these studies indicate the need for further research to examine the broader factors that influence privilege awareness and the importance of designing social justice interventions that are intersectional and address potential barriers to awareness, including system justifying beliefs.