Narratives Shape Cognitive Representations of Immigrants and Immigration-Policy Preferences
Open accessAbstract
Scholars from across the social and media sciences have issued a clarion call to address a recent resurgence in criminalized characterizations of immigrants. Do these characterizations meaningfully impact individuals’ beliefs about immigrants and immigration? Across two online convenience samples (total N = 1,054 adult U.S. residents), we applied a novel analytic technique to test how different narratives—achievement, criminal, and struggle-oriented—impacted cognitive representations of German, Russian, Syrian, and Mexican immigrants and the concept of immigrants in general. All stories featured male targets. Achievement stories homogenized individual immigrant representations, whereas both criminal and struggle-oriented stories racialized them along a White/non-White axis: Germany clustered with Russia, and Syria clustered with Mexico. However, criminal stories were unique in making our most egalitarian participants’ representations as differentiated as our least egalitarian participants’. Narratives about individual immigrants also generalized to update representations of nationality groups. Most important, narrative-induced representations correlated with immigration-policy preferences: Achievement narratives and corresponding homogenized representations promoted preferences for less restriction, and criminal narratives promoted preferences for more.
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Narratives about marginalized groups, such as struggle-oriented stories about immigrants, can counteract system justification tendencies that might otherwise discount or disparage immigrants' experiences.
“narratives about marginalized groups, such as struggle-oriented stories about immigrants, can counteract system justification tendencies that might otherwise discount or disparage immigrants’ experiences293–295.”
From Cognitive–motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts (2022) · cites this paper as [294]
The Discussion and “Narratives influence support for immigration policy” sections report that struggle narratives were associated with preferences for fewer immigration restrictions, while higher system justification predicted support for the status quo or greater restrictions. But the policy results found no interaction between narrative type and system justification; the paper does not show that struggle stories counteract those tendencies or prevent people from discounting immigrants’ experiences. Page numbers were not available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.85)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredSimilar patterns of polarization to those in Germany have been observed in the USA.
“Similar patterns have been observed in the USA294.”
From Cognitive–motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts (2022) · cites this paper as [294]
The Current Research identifies U.S. residents as participants, and the Discussion reports differences in their representations of immigrants by narrative and ideology. The immigration-policy results also report differing preferences. The paper does not compare these U.S. findings with patterns of polarization in Germany, so the claimed similarity is not established by this source. (LLM, conf=0.78)
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- Authors
- Martinez, J. E., Feldman, L. A., Feldman, M. J., & Cikara, M.
- Affiliations
- Princeton University (US)
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (US)
- Harvard University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Cikara, Mina
- Venue
- Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2021-01-13
- Volume
- 32
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 135-152
- ISSN
- 0956-7976 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-9280
- OpenAlex
- W3118435036
- Cited by
- 30
- References
- 42
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 2
- FWCI
- 7.62
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Locations
- Psychological Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (CAREER 1653188)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Migration, Refugees, and Integration
- Social Sciences › Communication › Media Studies and Communication
- Keywords
- immigration narratives, immigration policy preferences, criminalization of immigrants, racialization, national stereotypes, German immigrants, Russian immigrants, Syrian immigrants, Mexican immigrants
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Cognition, Emigration and Immigration, Ethnicity, Humans, Male, Public Policy, Emigrants and Immigrants
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