Perceived Intergroup Threat and Attitudes of Host Community Members Toward Immigrant Acculturation

Abstract

The authors expected the extent to which host community members (a) perceive immigrants as threatening, (b) believe that the immigrants are able to assimilate to the host community (permeability), and (c) consider their presence in the host community as legitimate to predict attitudes towards immigrant acculturation. The authors designed Study 1 to examine attitudes of Germans toward Turkish immigrants. Participants were 227 German white-collar and blue-collar workers. As expected, ethnocentric acculturation attitudes positively correlated with perceived threat and negatively correlated with perceived legitimacy and perceived permeability. However, only perceived threat contributed uniquely to the prediction of the attitudes. In Study 2, the authors applied an experimental manipulation of perceived threat. Before answering attitude questions, participants read magazine articles with a threatening, enriching, or irrelevant content. The manipulation had the predicted impact on the self-reported attitudes toward immigrants. However, the salience of threatening or enriching aspects of the Turkish culture did not affect implicitly measured attitudes.

Intergroup Perceptions and Attitudes toward Immigrants in a Culturally Plural Society

“…In the context of immigration research, Florack and colleagues' (Florack, Piontkowski, Bohman, Balzer, & Perzig, 2003) study of Germans' attitudes toward Turkish immigrants found a greater desire for community separation from immigrants and a reduction of immigrant numbers when intergroup boundaries were seen as permeable. Similar findings were reported in Spain, where the anticipation of an open border, visa-free entry policy led to negative stereotypes of foreigners and endorsement of a more restrictive immigration policy, at least for those immigrants from developing countries (Echabe & Gonzales, 1996).…”

The Effect of Group Boundary Permeability on Intergroup Prejudice: The Case of Rural-to-Urban Migrants in China

“…The group boundaries were either exogenous or endogenous in these apparently contradictory findings. For example, groups can be perceived as homogenous: the group boundary was socially constructed through nationality in Florack et al's (2003) study, and through the hukou system in Kuang and Liu's (2012) study. On the other hand, groups can be perceived as heterogenous if the group boundary is innate and created by race, as in Johnson et al's (2005) study.…”

Expected Hierarchical Integration Reduces Perceptions of a Low Status Group as Less Competent than a High Status Group While Maintaining the Same Level of Perception of Warmth

“…The group boundary between rural and urban Chinese is mainly caused by geographical classification other than biological classification (e.g., skin color or race). The rural-to-urban mobility may increase the homogeneity between rural and urban Chinese and promote urban Chinese to perceive a more common ingroup identity with rural residence (Zhang et al, 2014), which then reduces prejudice and discrimination (Gaertner et al, 1993; Florack et al, 2003). …”

“…Inspired by the social identity tradition, which focuses on the role of social context in intergroup relations (Reicher, 2004), the present research adopted a social dynamic perspective to explore the compensation effect. The aim was to examine the effects of group boundary permeability and the legitimacy of social hierarchy, two notable aspects of social structural change (Florack et al, 2003; Zhang et al, 2014), on the occurrence of the compensation effect.…”