Social Psychological Determinants of Prejudice towards Immigrants

Social Psychological Determinants of Prejudice towards Immigrants: History

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Sara Manganelli

Immigration processes and the possible marginalization of ethnic minorities in the receiving countries are essential issues in contemporary societies. Prejudice and discrimination can be critical obstacles to immigrants’ integration into the host country and can severely affect their well-being and mental health. This contribution aims to highlight the critical social–psychological processes underlying attitudes toward immigrants. First, it tackles the social psychological roots of social prejudice by focusing on the role of individual (ideological, motivational, and cultural) factors and categorization processes. Second, it examines how contextual factors such as intergroup perceptions and structural relations can lead to high levels of prejudice and discrimination towards immigrants.

prejudice
immigrants
social psychological determinants

1. Introduction

The immigration process and the possible marginalization of ethnic minorities in the receiving countries are essential issues that societies have to care about. Social prejudice and discrimination are severe obstacles for immigrant groups to develop a sense of belonging to the new society and are critical for their mental health (The APA Presidential Task Force on Immigration 2013). Thus, prejudice and discrimination—whether against economic migrants, asylum seekers, or refugees—must be regarded as major concerns for public health.

The issue of immigration is often intensely debated and divisive within society. Many people see immigrants as a threat to their country’s resources, stability, and cultural character (e.g., Esses 2021; ICMPD 2019; Nese 2022), and therefore display their prejudice against them or even behave in a discriminatory way. Socio-psychological research has pointed out that prejudice and its behavioral facet—namely, discrimination–can take different forms and has revealed that, in the last decades, overt intolerance and prejudice seem to have given way to subtler or ambivalent expressions of negative intergroup attitudes (Dovidio et al. 2013; Quillian 2006). Even though immigrants continue to be victims of major discrimination (e.g., being denied housing or being denied a promotion) or hate speech (e.g., Bilewicz and Soral 2020), they often experience more “routine” forms of discrimination (e.g., Alivernini et al. 2019; Cavicchiolo et al. 2022; Menegatti et al. 2017; Manganelli et al. 2021; Paletta et al. 2017).

Based on these considerations, the present contribution focuses on the main, consolidated, social–psychosocial accounts of the origins of prejudiced attitudes against immigrants to provide a detailed picture of the state of the art on factors that might account for prejudice towards this stigmatized social group. We will focus on the variety of individual (ideological, motivational, and cultural) and contextual (intergroup perceptions and structural relations) factors that can be called into play to explain prejudice and discrimination against immigrants. Such intertwined analysis of the role of different variables and integration of perspectives can increase the understanding of the multifaceted origins of prejudice and allow practitioners to implement more efficient interventions to challenge the detrimental outcomes of prejudice and discrimination.

2. Social Psychological Accounts of Prejudice

Social prejudice has been a crucial issue for social psychological research for decades. Allport (1954) pivotally defined it as “an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization (…) directed towards a group as a whole or towards an individual because he is a member of that group” (p. 10). As underlined in such definition, the social cognitive roots of prejudice can be found in the social categorization process that leads individuals to distinguish between “us” (the groups they belong to) and “them” (Tajfel and Turner 1979). Besides paving the way for social cognitive accounts of prejudice based on the process of social categorization, Allport (1954) also provided the idea of a generalized tendency towards prejudice, stating that someone who has prejudicial attitudes towards one group refuses all other (minority) outgroups (cf. Roets and Van Hiel 2011; Roets et al. 2012). This calls into play the problem of whether individual differences explain the endorsement of prejudice or if situational (i.e., contextual) cues shape it.

2.1. The Role of Individual Differences, Ideologies, and Motivations

2.1.1. Personality Traits

Prejudice and intergroup hostility can be predicted based upon stable and enduring personal characteristics. Adorno et al. (1950) were the first to consider prejudice as an expression of a personality trait, namely, the authoritarian personality. People with this trait suffer from the psychopathological consequences of hierarchical parent–child relations and express their hostility by attacking others. Also, there is evidence that the Big Five traits (Goldberg 1990) of agreeableness (i.e., being king and gentle vs. rude and harsh) and openness to experience (i.e., being innovative and unconventional vs. shallow and conventional) predict more positive attitudes towards immigrants; whereas neuroticism (i.e., being moody and anxious vs. relaxed and calm) is associated with more negative attitudes (for a review, see Hodson and Dhont 2015). Moreover, Sibley et al. (2010) highlighted that high scores on personality factors were predictive of prejudice to a low extent if the nature of the target group was not considered (e.g., derogated/low-status outgroups and dangerous groups). These trait-based approaches to prejudice have been criticized since they provide relatively inflexible explanations of intergroup discrimination/prejudice, whereas, in reality, intergroup antipathy can arise and dissipate within dramatically short spaces of time (Abrams and Hogg 1988^[1]).

2.1.2. Ideologies

Among person-based variables, the positive association between ideological constructs and prejudice has been underlined (e.g., Duckitt and Sibley 2009). The idea that individuals with authoritarian personalities are more prejudiced has been renewed and updated by Altemeyer (1981), who introduced the concept of Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). Altemeyer stressed that the roots of RWA are not related to psychodynamic explanations but to teaching and modeling, particularly during adolescence. More specifically, RWA is conceived as an individual’s ideology expressing adherence to conventional norms and values, uncritical submission to authorities, and aggressive feelings towards people violating the norms (Altemeyer 1981). In other words, it expresses the motivational goal of establishing and maintaining societal security, order, and cohesion.

Another individual ideology associated with higher prejudicial attitudes and legitimization of inequalities is the social dominance orientation (SDO; Sidanius and Pratto 1999). The SDO indicates an individual’s worldview about social hierarchies and the groups that deserve to be superior to others and are not directly related to a specific political ideology. People high in SDO are less sensitive to moral violations and the welfare of others. In contrast, people with low SDO are motivated by egalitarianism and altruistic social concerns, prioritizing fairness and harm avoidance. Given that SDO is also strongly linked with perceived competition by immigrants (Duckitt and Sibley 2010)—in line with predictions of the ethnic competition theory (Scheepers et al. 2002)—evidence has consistently shown that individuals with high SDO have more negative attitudes toward immigrants (e.g., Küpper et al. 2010).

Developmental studies have underlined that children’s sensitivity to intergroup inequality is associated with parents’ SDO (Tagar et al. 2017). Children of parents with low SDO were more fairness-oriented towards outgroups, whereas those of parents high in SDO favored the ingroup. Also longitudinal studies (e.g., Albarello et al. 2020) highlighted the role of adolescents' SDO in predicting higher levels of anti-immigrant prejudice at a later time, which in turn led to higher levels of SDO, thus showing that SDO is malleable, at least in adolescence.

Among ideologies, Hodson and Dhont (2015) highlighted further “rationalization constructs” or legitimizing myths that provide moral or intellectual legitimization to inequalities in society. People endorsing ideologies that justify the status quo, for instance, the belief that “prejudice is justified, normative, and ‘understandable’” (p. 21), are more likely to accept prejudice towards outgroups.

Similarly, beliefs in a just world (Lerner and Miller 1978) allow people to cope with inequality as they stress an individual’s motivation to believe that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. Interestingly, such beliefs are related to the justification of the status quo, as encompassed in the system justification theory (Jost 2020; Jost and Hunyady 2003). On the contrary, individual endorsement of values, such as self-transcendence values (Schwartz 2010), can be (negatively) associated with individuals’ prejudicial tendencies.

2.1.3. Epistemic Cognitive Motivations

The need for cognitive closure (NCC; Kruglanski 1989; Kruglanski et al. 2009) is another individual-level difference associated with intergroup biases and prejudice (e.g., Roets et al. 2012, 2015). Even though it can be conceptualized as an individual trait (cf. Webster and Kruglanski 1994), the NCC is a motivation to search for epistemic certainty and avoid the ambiguity that starts when individuals are confronted with a question they do not have an answer to and stops when the answer is found. Individuals with a high NCC tend to prefer stable environments and secure knowledge while disliking change (Kruglanski 2004). For these reasons, they refer to their groups as sources of knowledge stability (i.e., group centrism hypothesis; Kruglanski et al. 2006). As a consequence, high NCC individuals will be more likely to have negative attitudes toward outgroups such as immigrants (Dhont et al. 2011) since they represent a change that might threaten natives’ realistic and symbolic resources (Stephan and Stephan 2000). Interestingly, the NCC has been related with the so-called prejudice-prone personality theorized by Allport (1954) by a recent study (Albarello, Contu, et al., 2023^[2]) providing the first empirical test that individuals with high NCC are prejudiced towards multiple outgroups to the same extent.

The NCC might also be a feature of environments, which can be raised by threatening societal/ecological conditions causing uncertainty. As a consequence, during wars, worldwide pandemics, and economic and environmental crises, the increased NCC might, in turn, intensify prejudice against immigrants (Albarello et al. 2023a; Albarello et al. 2023b; Mula et al. 2022).

2.1.4. Moral Motivations

Other motivational factors that lead to enhanced prejudice towards immigrants have been highlighted by research on moral foundations (e.g., Baldner and Pierro 2019a, 2019b). According to the moral foundations theory (Graham et al. 2011; Haidt 2012), people judge what is right or wrong through moral intuitions rooted in the culture. Specifically, while the individualizing foundations of Fairness and Care emphasize protecting individuals and guaranteeing individual rights and prosperity, the binding foundations emphasize preserving larger groups (e.g., overall culture) through duties, loyalty, and purity. Studies have consistently shown that the binding moral foundations predicted prejudice (e.g., Baldner and Pierro 2019a, 2019b; Bianco et al. 2021; Federico et al. 2016), whereas the individualizing foundations are negatively associated with intergroup prejudice (e.g., Federico et al. 2013; Forsberg et al. 2019). Importantly, research has underlined that these moral motivations can be prompted by other individual-level factors such as RWA, SDO, or NCC (e.g., Hadarics and Kende 2018^[3]), thus suggesting that it is crucial to deepen knowledge of the intertwined effects of different kinds of individual-level antecedents of prejudice and to address the complex psychological processes underlying anti-immigrant prejudice.

2.1.5. Cultural Motivations

Recent contributions bridging insights from cultural psychology and social psychology of prejudice have underlined the role of desired cultural tightness–looseness in affecting prejudice. Cultural tightness is defined as “the strength of social norms, or how clear and pervasive norms are within societies, and the strength of sanctioning, or how much tolerance there is for deviance from norms within societies” (Gelfand et al. 2011, p. 1226). In this vein, strengthening social norms in response to threats serves as an adaptive mechanism that helps individuals coordinate to survive, but it can also lead to intolerant attitudes towards outgroups (e.g., immigrants, Dhont et al. 2011, and homosexuals, Brandt and Reyna 2010).

Consistent evidence has been collected on the relation between individuals’ desire for their culture/society to be tight and high levels of anti-immigrant prejudice (e.g., Gelfand 2018^[4]; Mula et al. 2021^[5]) since people with high desired cultural tightness view immigrants as sources of chaos against the order they seek for (Jackson et al. 2021^[6]).

This individual motivation is indeed fostered by situational uncertainty. For instance, Albarello et al. (2023d) showed that the situational threat of COVID-19 led people with a high NCC (Kruglanski 1989) to desire that their society endorse high cultural tightness through stricter definitions of allowed and forbidden behaviors in order to fight the spread of the virus. This, in turn, led to increased negative attitudes towards immigrants.

2.2. Categorization Processes and Automatic Ethnic Prejudice

The idea that (ethnic) prejudice stems from the ordinary process of social categorization helps explain why it is so difficult to eradicate it even from societies based on egalitarian principles. In particular, race is an extremely salient dimension of person categorization, which quickly occurs in information processing. For instance, studies conducted using event-related potentials (ERPs) of White people have shown that after 120ms, there are stronger early neural responses to Black than White faces (Kubota and Ito 2015).

Similarly, people categorize others more rapidly when they can use race than when they cannot (McCann et al. 1985). This ability appears very early in life: many studies have shown that by three years of age, children effortlessly sort people into racial categories and use membership in these categories to interpret behaviors in accord with the stereotype (Aboud 1989; Katz 1986). Thus, during socialization, cultural beliefs about social groups become well learned and are activated, without conscious awareness or intention, in the presence of members of stereotyped groups, and can consequently influence social thought and behavior (e.g., Brewer 1988; Fiske and Neuberg 1990). The consequences of these automatic activations have been shown by research conducted within the Weapon Identification paradigm.

Despite the above discouraging results, consistent evidence shows that ethnic prejudice is not inevitable. Although virtually everyone knows ethnic stereotypes, their influence can be diminished through controlled processing. Non-prejudiced individuals can intentionally inhibit stereotypes and replace them with belief-based responses when they are motivated to respond without bias, are aware that the stereotype has been activated, and have cognitive resources (Devine 1989). In recent years, several research programs have shown that situational or contextual factors play a central role in this inhibition process.

In sum, research has documented that stereotypes and biases are not unconditionally automatically activated and that prejudiced responses can be avoided. For some individuals, negative evaluations are automatically activated when encountering a person of a different ethnicity. However, individuals can be motivated, sincerely or strategically, to monitor and avoid the effects of such activation. Moreover, there are “truly non-prejudiced” individuals who do not experience the activation of the negative ethnic stereotype or may even experience an activation of a positive evaluation (Fazio et al. 1995). Thus, it is possible to think and act without prejudice.

2.3. Contextual Factors Leading to Prejudice

2.3.1. Perceived Intergroup Threat

Convergent evidence has stressed that intergroup threat (which can be defined as economic threat, cultural/values threat, safety/security threat, competition, threat to well-being/security, demographic threat, etc.; Esses 2021; for reviews, see Riek et al. 2006; Rios et al. 2018) is an antecedent of negative attitudes towards outgroups (e.g., Salvati et al. 2020), as well as the generalised exclusion of minority groups (e.g., Albarello et al. 2017, 2019). Such relationships should be understood through the lens of various social psychological theorizations emphasizing the role of threat and competition as antecedents of prejudice. Among them, the ethnic competition theory (Scheepers et al. 2002) assumes that mixing different groups will likely elicit intergroup tensions due to competition over resources. Accordingly, the natives can perceive immigrants as a threat to the ingroup’s welfare (Stephan and Stephan 2000), representing resource stress that leads to perceived group competition for resources (Esses 2021).

Stephan and Stephan (2000) distinguished between realistic threat (i.e., a threat to the ingroup’s existence, economic, and political power, or physical or material well-being) and symbolic threat (i.e., threat related to outgroups’ differential morals, values, beliefs, and standards) and showed that both types of threat predict social prejudice towards immigrants. In this respect, Pereira et al. (2010) found that realistic threats due to immigrants (operationalized as threats to well-being/safety and economic threat) mediated the relationship between prejudice and opposition to immigration. In contrast, symbolic threat (i.e., a threat to natives’ culture/identity) mediated the effects of prejudice on opposition to the naturalization of outgroups. Interestingly, the impact of intergroup threat in enhancing prejudice and discrimination towards an ethnic outgroup was also found with an implicit measure of discrimination, such as the level of abstraction of terms used to describe the outgroup (see Albarello and Rubini, 2018; Rubini et al. 2014).

Moreover, Albarello et al. (2019) investigated the role of threat to ingroup’s resources and threat to ingroup’s identity and culture on the projection of negative prejudice from one minority (i.e., outgroup projection; Albarello and Rubini 2011^[7]), negatively evaluated outgroup (e.g., Roma and Islamic terrorists) onto another super-inclusive and partially overlapping outgroup (e.g., Romanians and Arabs). They found that both realistic and symbolic intergroup threats led to higher affective prejudice towards the super-inclusive outgroup and the perception that the members of the minority outgroup and the super-inclusive one “were all alike,” thus extending negative attitudes from one outgroup onto another. A further study (Albarello and Rubini 2022) showed that both kinds of threat enhanced the denial of human rights (Albarello and Rubini 2012^[8]; Albarello et al. 2018^[9]) to migrants.

2.3.2. Uncertainty as Situational Threat

Besides intergroup threats related to the outgroups, research has shown that the uncertainty raised by various situational threats (e.g., economic threats, environmental threats, pandemic-related threats, immigrant threats, etc.) works as a proxy for individual-level factors outlined above as antecedents of prejudice, such as the NCC, binding moral foundations, system justification, etc. (Jost et al. 2003; Strupp-Levitsky et al. 2020). For instance, research on the NCC has shown that situational uncertainty operationalized in terms of individual’s concern for the COVID-19 threat led individuals with high NCC to desire their country to be tighter, which in turn increased prejudice towards immigrants (Albarello et al. 2023d; Mula et al. 2022).

2.3.3. Structural Features of Intergroup Relations

Social psychologists have underlined that structural features of intergroup relations can act as antecedents of prejudice and discrimination. Studies adopting the “minimal group paradigm” (Tajfel et al. 1971) identified a series of conditions under which ingroup love/favoritism (e.g., preference for ingroup members) or outgroup hate/derogation (e.g., the allocation of “penalties” to outgroup members) are likely to occur (e.g., Moscatelli et al. 2017; Rubini et al. 2014). For instance, Rubini and colleagues (2007^[10]) showed that both low- and high-power groups attributed more penalties to the outgroup compared to groups in an equal-power situation. Moscatelli et al. ^[11] (2008) also showed that high- and low-status groups described the outgroup in a more biased fashion than equal-status groups, suggesting that status asymmetries enhance outgroup derogation conveyed through language. In a similar vein, Moscatelli et al. (2014^[12]) examined the consequences of experiencing relative deprivation (i.e., the perception that the ingroup is worse off than an outgroup) or relative gratification (i.e., the feeling that the ingroup is better off than an outgroup). They found that both experiences increased behavioral and linguistic discrimination towards the outgroup.

Even though conducted in the laboratory, these studies demonstrated that contextual structural societal differences could enhance discrimination and prejudicial attitudes towards outgroups by advantaged and disadvantaged social groups. More ecological research showed converging results. For instance, Pettigrew et al. (2008) found that fraternal relative deprivation was linked to prejudice against immigrants in Europe. Guimond and Dambrun (2002), who manipulated relative deprivation and relative gratification by bogus information on respondents’ job prospects compared to an outgroup, found that both conditions increased prejudice against North African immigrants in France compared to a control condition.

More recently, Jetten et al. (2021), integrating macro-economic and political science findings with socio-psychological processes, showed that all the wealth groups within a society (i.e., the poor, the middle, and the more affluent groups) become more opposed to immigrants when economic inequality is growing rather than declining. Moreover, extreme-right-wing–anti-immigrant movements can develop not only when the national economy is contracting but also when the economy is booming (Mols and Jetten 2016) since the leaders of those movements are able to turn objective relative gratification into perceived relative deprivation.

In the attempt to examine the contextual factors that determine prejudice, it is crucial to stress that stereotypes and prejudice are socially created and transmitted and that different types of prejudice target different groups. In this respect, Fiske et al. (2002) (see also Cuddy et al. 2008) formulated the stereotype content model (SCM), which provides a heuristic explanation of the peculiar and different contents of prejudice against social groups based on the perception of the groups in terms of warmth (i.e., trustworthiness and sociability) and competence (i.e., how capable or agentic groups are). This model also allows the detection of the multiple dimensions underlying prejudicial portrayals of a group by considering the combination of warmth (high and low) and competence (high and low). As a consequence, four types/clusters of prejudice have been theorized: (a) admiration prejudice (the most positive pattern of prejudice, usually referring to ingroups) targets highly competent and warm groups who do not compete with other groups; (b) paternalistic prejudice targets low competence and high warmth groups (e.g., older people); (c) envious prejudice portrays groups as competent but not warm, that is, as having no positive intentions toward the ingroup (e.g., Asians); and (d) finally, contemptuous prejudice targets low competence and low warmth groups (e.g., homeless people).

Considering these variegated socially shared perceptions of specific social groups research has also highlighted the crucial role of dehumanization (i.e., the denial of full humanness to individuals or groups as a specific facet of prejudice and discrimination; Albarello and Rubini 2008^[13]; Haslam 2006). The most critical finding collected in such a field is that the attribution of lesser humanness to outgroups is a factor that enhances the extent to which the group is discriminated. Interestingly, Albarello and Rubini (2015)^[14] experimentally manipulated the perceived humanity of a target and found higher linguistic derogation of the less human target expressed in the use of more abstract negative terms as well as of derogatory insults (^[15]).

This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/socsci13010024

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