Increasing Inclusion, Reducing Prejudice

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Social scientists have documented the ease with which and ways in which individuals come to exclude others. Less is known about what works to reduce exclusion and prejudice. This panel explores interventions that increase inclusion or reduce prejudice at the individual, social, and policy levels, with implications for migrant integration, intergroup cooperation, and social stability.

Williamson, Adida, Lo, Platas and Prather offer an investigation into the role that perspective-taking plays in improving attitudes toward immigrant admission in the US. They first test the effect of priming one's family history on attitudes toward immigration, showing remarkable consistency of results across three different studies. They also offer a test of one mechanism through which this effect could occur: emotion regulation. Theirs offers new insights into the role that inducing empathy can play at the individual level for increasing inclusion of immigrant minorities.

Flores et al. apply a perspective-taking exercise to the inclusion of trans persons, randomly varying the intensity of the perspective-taking exercise. Theirs offers a more nuanced view of the role that empathy can play in reducing prejudice, showing that in some instances, empathy can actually backfire.

Abdelgadir and Fouka examine the role that state policy and social violence play in shaping the integration experience of Muslim immigrants across Europe. Across the Netherlands, UK, Germany, and Sweden, they investigate the extent to which legislative restrictions on Muslim dress, on one hand, and hate crimes on the other, impact Muslims' perception of discrimination.

And in a field experimental setting, Choi et al. test the extent to which norm-abidance by a vulnerable minority reduces the prejudice that majority-host members hold toward the group. Specifically, the authors find that when a Muslim female confederate expresses progressive attitudes toward women in public, female bystanders exhibit lower levels of discrimination toward Muslims.

This session brings together evidence from a number of countries (the US, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden), relying on a diversity of empirical and methodological approaches ranging from survey experiments to field experiments to observational data. It also comprises a diversity of authors, from Ph.D. candidate to senior professor, male and female, and including a number of scholars of color.

Sub Unit

• Theme Panel

Chair

• Margot Dazey Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse

Discussant

• Melissa Sands London School of Economics

Individual Presentations

• Priming Family History to Increase Support for Immigration - Scott Williamson, Bocconi University; Claire Leslie Adida, UCSD; Adeline Lo, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Melina Raquel Platas Izama, NYU Abu Dhabi; Lauren Prather, University of California, San Diego

• A Day in the Life: Perspective Taking and Empathy for Transgender Rights - Andrew R. Flores, American University; Daniel C. Lewis, Siena College; Donald P. Haider-Markel, University of Kansas; Patrick R. Miller, University of Kansas; Jami K. Taylor, University of Toledo

• Perceived Discrimination and Adolescent Muslim Integration - Aala Abdelgadir, Stanford University; Vasiliki Fouka, Stanford University

• Feminist Opposition to Political Islam: Evidence from Social Encounters - Danny Choi, Brown University; Mathias Poertner, London School of Economics and Political Science; Nicholas Sambanis, University of Pennsylvania