Folk theories of nationality and anti-immigrant attitudes

Mostafa Salari Rad () and Jeremy Ginges
Additional contact information
Mostafa Salari Rad: New School for Social Research
Jeremy Ginges: New School for Social Research

Nature Human Behaviour, 2018, vol. 2, issue 5, 343-347

Abstract: Abstract Nationality governs almost every aspect of our lives, including where we may live and travel, as well as our opportunities for education, healthcare and work. It is a common-sense social category that guides us in making inferences about the social world1–4. Nationalism has been extensively studied within the social5–16 and cognitive sciences17–25, but there has been little empirical investigation into folk theories regarding what determines someone’s nationality. In experiments carried out in the United States and India (N = 2,745), we used a variant of the switched-at-birth task26–31 to investigate the extent to which people believe that nationality is determined by biology or is a malleable social identity that can be acquired32–34. We find that folk theories of nationality seem remarkably flexible. Depending on the framing of the question, people report believing that nationality is either fluid or fixed at birth. Our results demonstrate that people from different cultures with different experiences of migration and different explicit stereotypes of their own nation may share similar folk theories about nationality. Moreover, these theories may shape attitudes towards immigrants—an important public-policy issue35–37. Belief that nationality is malleable is associated with more positive attitudes towards immigrants even when holding ideology constant.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0334-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nathum:v:2:y:2018:i:5:d:10.1038_s41562-018-0334-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0334-3

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().