Do you think immigrants should not get unemployment benefits?
Should immigrants have the same rights to receive social protection benefits and services in the countries they move to as the people who already live there?
Most probably, you have an opinion on this issue, right?¹ Maybe you think that countries should “take care of their own first” and that immigrants should therefore never get the same access to healthcare, unemployment benefits, or pensions? Or, alternatively, you may think that discriminating against immigrants is wrong and that they therefore should be treated equally, at least after some time in the country? Maybe you also know (of) someone who thinks about this very differently than you do — and you often wonder how on earth they could possibly have that opinion?
My colleagues Alyssa, Mia, and Juliana and I had more or less that same question: We wanted to find out why some people are categorically opposed to granting immigrants social rights while others want to give them access right away (and everything in between).
To develop ideas, we looked into research in social and political psychology, which found that people have relatively stable general predispositions (think: leanings, tendencies) that inform their attitudes toward more specific political issues. Very simply put: Some people are wired to think a certain way, and this then leads them to have certain political views.
One such leaning is called authoritarianism. To see what that is, think about how you would answer the following question²:
“Which quality should children be taught at home: Good manners or imagination and independence?”
If you went straight for good manners, you may lean authoritarian, which means you tend to see order, stability, and conformity as important and may not be a big fan of a diverse society. On the other hand, if you went for imagination and independence, you probably have more of a libertarian mindset that values, well, independence and liberty. (You can also fall in between.)
Next, think about whether you would agree to this:
“To get ahead in life, you sometimes have to step on others.”
If you do agree, you probably have a leaning called social dominance orientation — you tend to see the world as a kind of “dog-eat-dog” competitive jungle in which only the strong (should) survive.
Now consider this statement:
“Germans are more hard-working than Italians.”
Do you agree or disagree? If you agree, you may tend to think generally a lot in stereotypes and have an ethnocentric outlook on the world.
Finally, maybe you have already heard about something called implicit attitudes or implicit biases? Simply put, these are attitudes and associations that people have without being generally aware of them. Psychologists have found, for example, that many have deep-seated and automatic associations of darker-skinned persons with “bad” and lighter-skinned persons with “good”. If you like, you can do a test here to see if you may hold implicit biases.
With this as a basis, we wanted to test if any of these lead people to want to exclude immigrants from social protection benefits. To do this test, we designed an experiment in which we presented people in different countries with fictional unemployed persons and asked them how much of their previous income a given unemployed person should get. Importantly, we randomized the attributes of each unemployed person shown to our participants: One person may have been a woman from Nigeria who had been working for two years, another person would have been a male native citizen without any prior employment record.
By randomizing profiles in this way, we could later “isolate” the pure effect of having a foreign background on being granted access to unemployment benefits — i.e., the extent to which participants want to exclude people from benefits based solely on their immigrant background. Then we asked people questions similar to those above to measure their predispositions and ran a test to measure implicit bias.
To make a long story (sorry!) short, we found that social dominance orientation and ethnocentrism are the strongest predictors of wanting to exclude immigrants from social protection systems. Authoritarianism had more limited effects, and implicit bias had no effects.
These findings matter because they show that when people want to exclude immigrants from social protection systems, then they do that often not because they have negative stereotypes about immigrants or because they dislike diversity — sometimes people just prefer a hierarchical, “dog-eat-dog” kind of world in which weaker groups (often immigrants) get the short end of the stick.
If you want to know more about our study, you can download and read the published article for free here: https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217241228456.
¹ Did I clickbait you, and you actually wanted to hear how immigrants are either all lazy and stealing benefits or, alternatively, that having borders is wrong? Sorry. To sort of make it up, here is a very non-exhaustive selection of peer-reviewed articles that, I think, presents a balanced view on this issue: This one, this one, this one, this one, and this one.
² I shamelessly stole the idea to use mock questions to illustrate psychological concepts from Daniel Kahneman’s book.
