Traditional accounts of intergroup bias often fail to consider the complexity of intergroup phenomena by insufficiently distinguishing between (a) attitudes, emotions and action tendencies, (b) classes of threat that promote intergroup bias and (c) subtle category distinctions amongst social groups. We develop a nuanced account of antimigrant bias by distinguishing between (a) manifestations of bias in emotions and action tendencies, (b) kinds of threat that drive antimigrant bias, and(c) kinds of migrant groups (economic migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers). By employing within-subjects designs in two prominent migrant-receiving countries (N Australia = 239, N US = 200), we find that two distinct classes of threat emerge: in-group morality threat and conflict-related threat. These threats predict specific emotion and action tendency profiles. Our findings carry important implications for the conceptualization of antimigrant bias. We also discuss implications of our findings for facilitating positive relations between receiving communities and migrants via in-group morality threat.The world is facing a migration crisis-immigration rates are at an unprecedented high and at least 65 million people are currently displaced worldwide (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2017). Understanding prejudice and discrimination toward migrants is thus essential for ensuring their

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Studies of visual search demonstrate that the ‘learned value’ of stimuli (the extent to which they signal valued events, such as rewards and punishments) influences whether they will be prioritized by spatial attention. Recent work suggests that learned value also modulates attentional prioritization even when all stimuli are presented in the same location, suggesting an influence on temporal selection wherein value-related stimuli become more capable of disrupting central mechanisms of perceptual awareness. However, it remains unclear whether temporal selection is influenced specifically by learning about the relationship of stimuli with reward, or with punishment, or both. This question motivated the current experiments. Participants saw a stream of pictures in a central location, and had to identify the orientation of a rotated target picture. In Experiment 1, response accuracy was reduced if the target was preceded by a ‘valued’ distractor picture that signaled that a correct response to the target would be rewarded, relative to a distractor picture that did not signal reward. In Experiment 2, accuracy was reduced if the valued distractor picture signaled that an incorrect response would be punished, relative to a distractor that did not signal punishment. Experiment 3 replicated these findings, and demonstrated that the influence of rewards/punishments persisted into an extinction phase in which valued distractors were entirely task-irrelevant. These findings suggest that it is the motivational significance of the outcome, rather than its valence, that is the crucial determinant of the influence of learned value on temporal selection.

This research is the first to examine the effects of moral versus practical pro-attitudinal advocacy in the context of self-persuasion. We validate a novel advocacy paradigm aimed at uncovering why moral advocacy leads to polarization and proselytization. We investigate four distinct possibilities: (1) expression of moral foundational values (harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity), (2) reliance on moral systems (deontology and consequentialism), (3) expression of moral outrage, (4) increased confidence in one’s advocacy attempt. In Study 1 (N = 255) we find differences between moral and practical advocacy on the five moral foundations, deontology, and moral outrage. In Study 2 (N = 218) we replicate these differences, but find that only the expression of moral foundations is consequential in predicting attitude polarization. In Study 3 (N = 115) we replicate the effect of moral foundations on proselytization. Our findings suggest that practical compared to moral advocacy may attenuate polarization and proselytization. This carries implications for how advocacy can be re-framed in ways which minimize social conflict.

Abstract. Across two studies we show that attitudes can paradoxically depolarize when people advocate for their own opinions. In Study 1 ( n = 276), we show that attitude depolarization is driven by how much meta-cognitive confidence people place in their advocacy attempt, such that those who experience low confidence during advocacy are more likely to depolarize. In Study 2 ( n = 495), we show that meta-cognitive confidence predicts communicative intentions, such as intentions to engage with those holding dissimilar views. In Study 2, we also show that the confidence–polarization and confidence–engagement links are unaffected by audience attitudes, but are moderated by Need-for-Cognition. The findings suggest that confidence and level of elaboration may predict some self-persuasive effects of pro-attitudinal advocacy.