The Road to Liberation is Paved with Threats: A Biopsychosocial Perspective on Minoritized Individuals’ Responses to Hierarchy-Disruptive Social Change

When social equates to social mobility, it elicits adaptive (“challenge”) stress responses among low-status individuals. Instead, hierarchy-disruptive social change may impose under-theorized demands on minoritized individuals, eliciting maladaptive (‘threat’) stress. Thus, LGBTQ+ (n = 57) and cisgender-heterosexual (n = 57) participants expressed their opinion about the status quo and the social change (introducing a non-binary constitution) while cardiovascular challenge-threat was measured. As hypothesized, LGBTQ+ participants exhibited threat when discussing change, compared to the status quo; unexpectedly, cisgender-heterosexual participants exhibited challenge. Among LGBTQ+ participants, higher personal, but not ingroup, demands paired with lower personal resources predicted higher threat. Verbal opinions, coded into five clusters of demands and resources mapped onto challenge-threat, endorsement of change, and protest intentions (but not donations). Notably, one cluster combining failure and retaliation demands with moral hope and collective resources revealed that minoritized individuals persist in social change despite threat, potentially at the cost of their well-being.