White Americans do not feel threatened by demographic change, new study finds

A new study published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science casts doubt on a widely accepted idea in political psychology: that White Americans respond with a sense of threat when told they will no longer be the majority in the United States. In contrast to many earlier studies, this large-scale experiment found that learning about demographic change had little impact on White Americans’ policy preferences, feelings toward racial groups, or willingness to take political or personal action.

For the past decade, researchers have explored the idea that messages about the United States becoming a majority-minority country can spark feelings of status threat among White Americans. These studies often show that when White participants read about declining White population share, they become more supportive of conservative policies, more negative toward racial minorities, and more likely to endorse ethnocentric attitudes. The theory is that these reactions reflect anxiety over perceived loss of dominance in areas such as politics, culture, and society.

But the new study led by Andrew Engelhardt and colleagues Nicole Huffman and Veronica Oelerichat Stony Brook University suggests that these effects may not be as consistent or universal as previously thought. The researchers tested whether the context of the message matters, and whether White Americans react differently depending on what kind of status is portrayed as declining.

“This paper came out of a graduate seminar I taught on race and ethnic politics that Nicole and Veronica took. Through the semester we kept wondering about how white Americans think about demographic change,” said Engelhardt, an assistant professor of political science.

“Some things we read found evidence that demographic shifts historically led to more positive outgroup views, in contrast to existing evidence today that demographic change stimulates negative judgments for some. Similarly, our readings took us to different environments where demographic change may or may not occur, and whether advantaged individuals may or may not feel their status threatened. So this topic really came out of us wanting to make sense of what seemed to be some disparate evidence coupled with some open questions on present research designs.”

For their study, the researchers recruited 2,100 non-Hispanic White Americans in July 2024 using quotas based on U.S. Census demographics. Participants were randomly assigned to read one of four short articles. Three described racial change in different domains: the overall population (a common version used in past studies), political influence (projected changes in the racial makeup of the electorate), or cultural representation (diversity in media and entertainment). The fourth article, used as a control, discussed geographic mobility and did not mention race.

After reading their assigned article, participants completed a series of questionnaires measuring their perceptions and beliefs. These included their sense that White Americans were losing influence, their feelings of being symbolically or realistically threatened by other groups, their preferences for policies both related and unrelated to race, and their attitudes toward racial and political groups. They also indicated how likely they were to take political or personal actions that either supported or opposed racial diversity and minority rights.

The results confirmed that the different articles worked as intended: each one shaped how participants thought about White people’s place in the population, electorate, or media landscape. For example, those who read about cultural change were more likely to believe that White people would be a minority in television and film. However, the more important question was whether these changes in perception would influence feelings of threat or political behavior.

The researchers did find that across all three treatments—whether participants read about population change, political change, or cultural change—White Americans became more likely to believe their group’s social status was declining. This basic sense of “status change” did increase.

But none of the treatments increased feelings of status threat. Measures of symbolic threat (such as believing American values were being undermined), realistic threat (such as believing jobs were being taken by other groups), and concerns about national identity showed no meaningful change. In other words, even when White Americans recognized a shift in their group’s position, they didn’t necessarily feel endangered or attacked.

“Perhaps the most surprising result was the lack of results on most outcomes,” Engelhardt told PsyPost. “We had expected reminders of demographic change would alter whites’ attitudes, given this appears broadly in published work. But not finding this here surprised us.”

Moreover, the study found no evidence that the information made participants more conservative. Across all conditions, participants’ views on policies—both racial and non-racial—did not become more conservative. Attitudes toward groups such as Black Americans, Latinos, or the Black Lives Matter movement also remained unchanged.

There was one exception: the article about political change modestly increased the likelihood that participants would consider political actions opposing immigration or diversity. But this effect was small and not found in other areas like personal behavior or cultural change.

Importantly, the researchers also looked at whether responses differed by political affiliation or ideology. Previous work suggested that conservatives react more negatively to demographic change, while liberals might respond positively. But in this study, no consistent differences emerged between liberals and conservatives. The demographic shift message did not reliably provoke polarization based on party or ideology, even when participants were exposed to specific threats to political or cultural dominance.

These findings run counter to much of the earlier research in this area. While the researchers cannot entirely rule out the possibility that their sample was different or that previous studies overstated their effects, they designed the study to address these concerns. Their sample size was large enough to detect even small effects, and their measures replicated those used in earlier experiments. They also included newer forms of the racial shift message to better reflect different types of perceived status loss.

One possible explanation is that Americans may already be aware of the country’s changing demographics, and so messages about this shift no longer feel surprising or threatening. The authors suggest that attitudes about race and status may have become more stable and less sensitive to new information, particularly after years of heightened public discourse around race, diversity, and identity. If beliefs about demographic change are already well-formed, reading another article about population projections may not do much to change them.

Another possibility is that status threat operates more like a personality trait than a situational reaction. In this view, people who already feel threatened by social change may not need to be reminded of demographic shifts to express those views. They may have internalized those beliefs long ago. If that’s the case, status threat may be less about responding to new information and more about long-standing psychological or ideological orientations.

“There are three things I think useful from the results,” Engelhardt told PsyPost. “The first thing is that most white Americans’ sense of whether or not their group is threatened by demographic change is pretty well developed. Day to day exposure to news reports on a diversifying country or increasing diversity on TV news programs is unlikely to cause them to reevaluate their position as white Americans. This sense seems baked in, potentially given the salience of demographic change in the last few election cycles.”

“Second, whites do not seem to think about demographic change as unique to a context in which it is occurring. Some of our respondents learned about growing racial diversity as captured in Census reports, others about this in terms of the U.S. electorate, and still others in terms of TV and film casts and programming. Reactions to this information were quite similar across conditions. Demographic change appears to be demographic change, no matter where one puts it.”

“Last, whites’ politics does not affect how they respond to this information,” Engelhardt continued. “We might think white Republicans and white Democrats would react differently to this information because their political preferences relate to demographic change in different ways. But we find no evidence this is the case.”

The study has some limitations. It focused only on non-Hispanic White Americans, so the findings may not apply to other groups. It also used short, text-based treatments, which might differ from real-world political messaging delivered through more emotional or sustained channels. And while the null findings are informative, they do not prove that status threat responses never happen—just that they may not be as consistent or widespread as previously claimed.

“One important limitation is that our design is a one-off exposure to information,” Engelhardt noted. “We cannot know how repeated exposure to these trends would alter opinions. Nor does our study incorporate explanations about whether these trends are good or bad, as we might experience in political rhetoric about the same.”

Even so, the results call into question a major assumption in political psychology: that reminders of declining White dominance automatically generate conservative backlash. The researchers encourage others in the field to reconsider how and when status threat matters. They call for more precise theories about what triggers these feelings, and for attention to the ways that individual predispositions, political environments, and institutional contexts shape responses to social change.

The study, “Validating Whites’ Reactions to the ‘Racial Shift,’” was published March 14, 2025.