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Abstract Children in the United States (N = 488, 4–11 years, 239 females, 248 males, one other, 53% White; data collected 2021–2022) participated in three studies investigating their expectations about immigrants. Participants recognized that immigration impacts characters' national identity and behaviors. Although previous research reported that children may essentialize nationality, participants instead reasoned flexibly about immigrant characters. Children expected immigrant characters to share behaviors and preferences with people from both their heritage and host countries, suggesting they may think immigrants hold dual national identities. Even the youngest children tested (ages 4–6) reasoned flexibly about behaviors based on immigration status. Thus, children appear to view national identity as constructed through social and cultural experiences, rather than something innate.
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Narratives Shape Cognitive Representations of Immigrants and Immigration-Policy Preferences
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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- Award ID(s):
- 1653188
- PAR ID:
- 10546640
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Psychological Science
- Volume:
- 32
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0956-7976
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 135-152
- Size(s):
- p. 135-152
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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