Accurate information can reduce negative attitudes toward immigrants in the United States, according to new research published in the journal Demography — and this effect persists for at least a month. The study provides causal evidence that misinformation about immigration influences people’s policy preferences.
“I am interested in how attitudes towards minorities are formed and whether information has a role in correcting misperceptions and affecting policy preferences,” explained study author Diego Ubfal, an assistant professor at Bocconi University in Italy.
“In this paper, we wanted to test whether correcting misperceptions about the size and characteristics of the immigrant group can lead to less negative attitudes towards immigrants. Eventually, this could reduce prejudice, facilitate the integration of immigrants into society, and limit support for anti-immigration policies.”
“From a personal point of view, my experience as an immigrant in Italy and the United States has been very positive. But in many cases I heard people saying that I was not the immigrant they had in mind when they expressed their support for anti-immigrant policies,” Ubfal said.
“This is in line with the theory we cite in our paper that people identify with the idea of a deserving immigrant category. In our context, one that comes to the country legally, who wants to work, does not commit crime and quickly learns the local language.”
In the study, 1,995 people living in the United States reported how worried they were about immigration and were then asked to estimate the proportion of immigrants in the United States, the proportion of undocumented immigrants in the United States, the unemployment rate of immigrants, incarceration rate of immigrants, and proportion of immigrants who cannot speak English.
The researchers found that participants tended to have higher estimates than the actual values. In other words, U.S. residents tended to overestimate how many immigrants were in their country, and also misperceived their rate of unemployment and incarceration.
Half of the participants were then told the correct answers to these five statistics about immigration. All of the participants then answered more specific questions about their views of immigrants and immigration policies.
The researchers found that those who received the correct answers became more supportive of legal immigrants. For example, those who received the correct statistics were less likely to say that immigrants have produced more disadvantages than advantages for the United States as a whole over the last 10 years.
“We show that by providing information on the average characteristics of immigrants in the United States, we can positively affect the attitudes groups opposed to immigration (e.g., Republicans) had before receiving the information. We believe this is because those who receive the information realize that the average immigrant is more in line that they had previously thought with the deserving immigrant category they formed in their minds,” Ubfal told PsyPost.
The study had a number of strengths: “We conduct a randomized control trial to be able to claim the effect of the information on attitudes is a causal effect. We have outcomes (donation and petition) that do not only rely on self-reported answers. We have a follow-up to rule out that effects are ephemeral. We elicit beliefs before and after the information is provided to show how they change in treatment and control groups,” Ubfal explained.
“One caveat is that we do see that a month after the information is provided there is again a small over-estimation of the statistics. This could indicate that repeated interventions might be necessary to achieve more persistent effects,” he noted.
“The main questions that still need to be addressed are the importance of the credibility of the agent who provides the information (the government, scientists or the media) and how this information is provided in order to have a stronger impact (e.g., basic statistics, emotional anecdotes).”
The study, “Does Information Change Attitudes Toward Immigrants?“, was authored by Alexis Grigorieff, Christopher Roth, and Diego Ubfal.
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