Imagining Self: Improving Attitudes toward Arab Migrants in Spain

• In Event: Communication, Engagement, and Political Participation

Abstract

As migration in recent years from the global south to the global north continues at an unprecedented rate, prejudice towards migrants has become an increasingly pressing problem. This ethnic prejudice – negative, dehumanizing attitudes and behaviors towards ethnic others – continues to rewrite politics and rewire societies throughout North America and Europe as it feeds increasingly strident nativist, populist, and nationalist discourse and movements.

It is little wonder, then, that scholars have trained increasing focus on identifying means for intergroup prejudice reduction. Presently, many approaches to intergroup prejudice reduction seek to generate empathy for disliked outgroups by highlighting common humanity, pursuing “perspective taking,” showing human suffering, and so forth (Paluck and Green 2009; Broockman and Kalla 2020). Other approaches do things like target certain emotions within participants as the root of prejudice, or adapt cognitive behavioral and psychotherapeutic principles to “treat” prejudice (Birtel and Crisp, 2012; 2015). However, these approaches and others generally have yielded surprisingly little success (Paluck and Green 2021). We believe that this is in part because people receiving such messages feel uncomfortable as new perspectives about a disliked group clash with their existing perspectives, which are often deeply intertwined with their sense of self (Gubler et. al. 2022).

In what follows, we propose what we believe is an innovative, new approach to intergroup prejudice reduction that relies on insights from research on mind-mapping and self-priming. Its key premise is that individuals will be more likely to change prejudicial attitudes and behaviors towards a disliked outgroup when engaging internal information – their past experiences and their feelings associated with those experiences – rather than external information foreign to their personal experience. Prejudice reduction can be more successful when focused on the experiences of the prejudiced, rather than trying to get them to “imagine others” (Batson 2009; Sirin et. al. 2021), a common approach in existing literature.

We present results from a recent large (N = 2000) survey experiment with a nationally diverse sample of Spaniards designed to test our approach to prejudice reduction towards Arab migrants. After asking individuals a few preliminary demographic questions and a question to measure pre-treatment attitudes towards Arab migrants in Spain, the survey randomly assigned individuals to one of five conditions: a pure control, a placebo control, or one of three “imagine self” writing reflection treatments. The three treatments asked individuals to write at least 150 characters in sharing a particular experience – a moment in time – that generated either [pleasant, unpleasant, or mixed] feelings towards Arabs in Spain. Participants were randomly assigned to write on just one type of experience (pleasant, unpleasant, mixed), but were promised that if the particular affect of this experience was not representative of their overall feelings towards Arabs in Spain, they would have an opportunity to share another experience at the end of the survey that more closely represents their overall feelings.

We hypothesized that while participants have varied experiences (pleasant, unpleasant, mixed) that shape their attitudes towards an outgroup, a focused reflection on one type of affect should activate memories/experiences and feelings associated with that particular affective association with the outgroup (pleasant, unpleasant, or mixed) and diminish the immediate salience of experiences associated with the other types of affect, and that post-treatment attitudes and behaviors will be influenced by this affect. We measured post-treatment attitudes of tolerance towards Arabs in Spain, and also included a behavioral measure of the same, expecting that those assigned both the pleasant and mixed reflections will show more post-treatment tolerance in attitudes and behavior, while those assigned the unpleasant reflection will show less.

The paper discusses our results and their implications.

Authors

• Joshua Ronald Gubler, Brigham Young University

• Darren G. Hawkins, Brigham Young University