History Matters: Effects of Culture‐specific Symbols on Political Attitudes and Intergroup Relations

Abstract

A theory of the historical anchoring and mobilization of political attitudes is proposed, arguing that culturespecific symbols, configured by historical charters, are an important resource in defining nationhood and legitimizing public opinion in a way that makes some political attitudes difficult to change. Five studies in New Zealand and Taiwan using diverse methods converged to show that historical events with "charter status" have an additive effect in explaining variance in political attitudes regarding biculturalism in New Zealand and independence in Taiwan even after controlling for the effects of Social Dominance Orientation, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, relevant social identities, and collective guilt. Field and lab experiments showed that the impact of historical symbols did not depend on the mobilization of social identity (e.g., increasing mean scores and indirect effects), but the historical anchoring of political attitudes in representations was resistant to change. Manipulations of the salience of historical events changed levels of social identification, but did not change mean levels of support for New Zealand biculturalism or Taiwanese independence. Even an intense and immersive pretest/posttest design taking high school students on a national museum tour failed to change attitudes towards biculturalism in New Zealand.Although many instances of violent intergroup conflict in recent memory have involved cultural groups built around ethnicity, nationality and religion; theory and research on the psychology of intergroup relations is typically formulated without making use of culture-specific systems of

Interethnic Factors as Predictors of the Subjective Well‐Being of Minority Individuals in a Context of Recent Societal Changes

“…Similar to the Identity Lens Model and in accordance with the theory of social representations of history, we propose a Representations of History Lens Model through which intergroup situations are perceived. This is in line with the historical anchoring hypothesis according to which perceived relevance of historical representations serves as an anchor for intergroup attitudes (Liu, Sibley, & Huang, ). History can be an important symbolic resource that is employed to justify or reject present sociopolitical views regarding intergroup relations (Liu & László, ; Sibley et al., ).…”

Human values and ideological beliefs as predictors of attitudes toward immigrants across 20 countries: The country‐level moderating role of threat

“…In summary, country‐level discourses about immigration and threat are produced by a combination of factors, including mass media, political leadership, demographics, and resource struggles. These form the representational resources (Liu, Sibley, & Huang, ) that can be articulated as societal‐level threats by mass media and political leaders (Powell, ; van Dijk, ). Further, these threats can produce a societal dynamic that moderates how individual‐level predictors impact on immigration attitudes in a given society.…”

“…They found that countries with low scores on embeddedness provided contexts that activated values to predict immigration attitudes more strongly because “in less embedded societies people are socialized and encouraged to cultivate their unique preferences and ideas and to pursue their own personal goals” (p. 280). However, it seems unlikely that values should always exert a stronger influence on attitudes in low‐embeddedness contexts; rather, it seems more logical that they should be activated as guides to behavior in societies where they have formed habitual associations with the object which is being evaluated (for possible mechanisms, see Liu, Sibley, et al, ; Claassen & McLaren ). In the present research, we argue that in some countries, immigration is a more salient topic due to societal discourses emphasized in mass media, describing concerns about immigration or threat related to immigrant groups (Claassen & McLaren ; Esses, et al, ; Ettinger & Udris, ; Powell, ; Reese, ).…”

Ideology and Post‐Colonial Society

“…A variety of indirect evidence exists for this observation. Sibley and Liu (2014) showed that there are critical differences in the types of policies supported by the public such that support for symbolic issues that value M aori culture tends to be higher than other issues aimed at actually redressing inequality via the redistribution of resources. Other research has documented differences in the importance placed on different aspects of national character (see Sibley, Hoverd, & Liu, 2011).…”