The hidden majority/minority consensus: Minorities show similar preference patterns of immigrant support as the majority population.

The acceptance of new arrivals has become an important topic regarding the social cohesion of the receiving countries. However, previous studies focused only on the native population's drivers of attitudes towards immigrants, disregarding that immigrant-origin inhabitants now form a considerable part of the population. To test whether the drivers for the willingness to support immigrants are the same for natives and immigrants and their descendants, we rely on a vignette study conducted in a representative German online panel (N = 3149) which contains an overrepresentation of immigrant-origin respondents. We presented participants with three vignettes of potential immigrants, varying, amongst other factors, economic prospects, safe and war-ridden countries of origin (to capture deservingness), as well as religious identity. While we find that minority members are generally slightly more welcoming towards immigrants than majority members, at their core are the same factors that drive attitudes to immigrants in both groups: economic cost, cultural similarity, and deservingness. However, we observe differences at the margins: Immigrant-origin respondents take into account economic prospects to a lesser degree than majority members do, and by trend, they are less likely to distinguish between immigrants from war-ridden and safe countries of origin. Furthermore, we can show that the preference for immigrants with the same religious identities not only occurs among majority members but also among minority members.

The "Big Two" in Hiring Discrimination: Evidence From a Cross-National Field Experiment.

We tested whether signaling warmth and competence ("Big Two") in job applications increases hiring chances. Drawing on a field experimental data from five European countries, we analyzed the responses of employers (N = 13,162) to applications from fictitious candidates of different origin: native candidates and candidates of European, Asian, or Middle-Eastern/African descent. We found that competence signals slightly increased invitation rates, while warmth signals had no effect. We also found ethnic discrimination, a female premium, and differences in callbacks depending on job characteristics. Importantly, however, providing stereotype signals did not reduce the level of ethnic discrimination or the female premium. Likewise, we found little evidence for interactions between stereotype signals and job demands. While speaking against the importance of "Big Two" signals in application documents, our results highlight the importance of group membership and hopefully stimulate further research on the role of in particular ethnic stereotypes for discrimination in hiring.

The Discriminatory Potential of Modern Recruitment Trends-A Mixed-Method Study From Germany.

People from marginalized groups are often discriminated against in traditional recruitment processes. Yet as companies faced with skill shortages change their recruitment strategies, the question arises as to whether modern recruitment trends such as the use of professional social network sites, active sourcing, and recruitment assignment to external agencies are affected by implicit or explicit discrimination. In our mixed-method study, we first conducted expert interviews with different types of recruiters to explore the potential for discrimination in the modern recruitment process. We then analyzed panel data from the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Germany to see whether there is quantitative evidence of discrimination in modern recruitment. A content analysis of the interviews shows that active sourcing and assignment of recruitment to private agencies are potentially affected by explicit discrimination. We identified three sources of discrimination in personnel selection: recruiters' own attitudes, explicit instructions from managers, and the recruiters' assumptions regarding companies' preferred candidates. The results of mixed multilevel analyses with the company as a second level resonate with the qualitative findings: companies actively approach female employees, older employees, and employees who are born in Southern/Eastern Europe less often and offer women jobs less often. The effects for gender were still significant when we included far-right voting as a moderator variable on the employee level, but the interactions were not significant. Effects for gender and older people in active sourcing were also significant and robust when controlling for income, number of children, level of school completion, and educational background. Our findings suggest that current legislation may be insufficient to protect candidates who belong to marginalized groups from discrimination in modern recruitment.

'Society thinks they are cold and/or incompetent, but I do not': Stereotype content ratings depend on instructions and the social group's location in the stereotype content space.

Stereotype content researchers have grown accustomed to ask participants how 'society' views social groups to tap into culturally shared stereotype content and to reduce social desirability bias (J Person Soc Psychol, 82, 2002, 878). However, methodological and theoretical considerations raise questions about this common practice, and stereotype content researchers have also asked for participants' personal perspective on social groups in the past. Nonetheless, how and whether stereotype content model scores empirically differ as a function of the instructed perspective remains questionable and to date untested. Thus, we investigated whether and, if so, how stereotype content results are affected when instructing participants to evaluate social groups from society's versus their personal perspective. Across three experiments (Study 1: N = 301; Study 2: N = 126; Study 3: N = 1,221), latent mean comparisons indicated that results regarding stereotype content ratings are affected by the instructed perspective (society's vs. personal) contingent on the social group's location in the stereotype content space: Stereotype content ratings were more negative when participants were asked to provide society's perspective on social groups compared to their own perspective, but only on an already depreciated stereotype content dimension. The number of possible comparisons across experimental conditions was substantially reduced, since preconditions for these analyses were not met. Given our methodological and theoretical considerations and empirical corroborations that the instructed perspective does affect results, we encourage a discussion on how to best measure culturally shared stereotype content and propose aggregating stereotype content scores from participants' personal perspective to the cultural level.

Ethnic diversity, trust, and the mediating role of positive and negative interethnic contact: a priming experiment.

This study not only shows that the empirically well-established negative relationship between residential diversity and trust in neighbors holds for the case of Germany, but goes beyond existing research by providing experimental evidence on the causal nature of the diversity effect. Respondents exposed to experimental stimuli that made salient the ethnic or religious heterogeneity of their neighborhoods display significantly lower levels of trust in their neighbors than do respondents in the control group. Further, we explore the role of interethnic contact in mediating the relationship between diversity and trust in a degree of detail unmatched by earlier studies. We consider not only positive forms of interethnic contact such as friendships, but also neutral and negative encounters between people of native and immigrant origin. We find that interethnic contacts mediate negative diversity effects on trust in different ways for both groups. For natives, distant encounters and negative experiences with immigrants in diverse contexts reduce trust, whereas for people of immigrant origin trust in neighbors suffers from the relatively small number of native acquaintances in diverse neighborhoods.