Narratives Shape Cognitive Representations of Immigrants and Immigration-Policy Preferences.
Psychol Sci
; 32(2): 135-152, 2021 02.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-33439794
ABSTRACT
Scholars from across the social and media sciences have issued a clarion call to address a recent resurgence in criminalized characterizations of immigrants. Do these characterizations meaningfully impact individuals' beliefs about immigrants and immigration? Across two online convenience samples (total N = 1,054 adult U.S. residents), we applied a novel analytic technique to test how different narratives-achievement, criminal, and struggle-oriented-impacted cognitive representations of German, Russian, Syrian, and Mexican immigrants and the concept of immigrants in general. All stories featured male targets. Achievement stories homogenized individual immigrant representations, whereas both criminal and struggle-oriented stories racialized them along a White/non-White axis Germany clustered with Russia, and Syria clustered with Mexico. However, criminal stories were unique in making our most egalitarian participants' representations as differentiated as our least egalitarian participants'. Narratives about individual immigrants also generalized to update representations of nationality groups. Most important, narrative-induced representations correlated with immigration-policy preferences Achievement narratives and corresponding homogenized representations promoted preferences for less restriction, and criminal narratives promoted preferences for more.
Palabras clave
Texto completo:
1
Bases de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Emigración e Inmigración
/
Emigrantes e Inmigrantes
Límite:
Adult
/
Humans
/
Male
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Psychol Sci
Asunto de la revista:
PSICOLOGIA
Año:
2021
Tipo del documento:
Article