Conditional Love: Threat and Attitudinal Perceptions of Immigrants Depend on Their Instrumentality to Locals’ Basic Psychological Needs
December 18, 2022
International Migrants Day, when the contributions of migrants all over the world are acknowledged, is marked on 18th December. The occasion was first observed by the United Nations General Assembly in 2000, a decade after the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families was adopted on 18th December 1990.
The psychological factors underlying locals’ attitudes toward immigrants are rarely studied. In ‘Conditional Love: Threat and Attitudinal Perceptions of Immigrants Depend on Their Instrumentality to Locals’ Basic Psychological Needs’ (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2021), Dr Jose C. Yong (Nanyang Business School), Assistant Professor Lile Jia (NUS Department of Psychology), Mr Ismaharif Ismail (NUS Department of Psychology), and Ms Peiwei Lee (NUS Department of Psychology) draw from goal pursuit and self-determination theory (SDT) to study the psychological factors behind locals’ attitudes and perceptions of immigrants as threats.
According to SDT, humans strive to satisfy three fundamental psychological needs: autonomy, belonging, and competence. Autonomy relates to making choices according to one’s free will, belonging relates to feeling connected to others, and competence relates to effectiveness and mastery. Based on this, the team asserts that threat perceptions vary depending on immigrants’ perceived capacity to hinder the satisfaction of locals’ psychological needs for autonomy, belonging, and competence.
Integrated threat theory (ITT) explains that negative attitudes can arise from realistic harms and competition, violation of symbolic values, or both. People’s evaluations of objects in social environments have long been linked to how they support or impede goal pursuit. As such, the threats and negative attitudes emerge against immigrant outgroups when locals view them as a hindrance to their goals or needs. For example, people who appreciate social diversity are less discriminatory toward immigrants because immigrants reaffirm what they value. Intergroup perceptions were also found to improve when groups regarded each other as complementary towards each other’s goals.
The research team conducted four studies with different configurations of local population segments and target immigrant groups. Participation samples were gathered from Singapore, where non-locals make up approximately 30% of the population.
The researchers found that where immigrants were seen to hinder locals’ feelings of competence, they were viewed as a symbolic threat towards their goals and needs. On the other hand, where immigrants seemed to be hindering locals’ state of autonomy, immigrants were perceived as a realistic threat by locals.
However, where immigrants were perceived to be hindering locals’ feelings of competence, the relationship between this competence hindrance and the general attitude towards them was notably positive. This meant that competence hindrance predicted negative attitudes only in the context where immigrants were viewed as realistic threats. This revealed a suppression effect where complex and often contradictory attitudes towards immigrants were often held.
The findings held even after controlling for intergroup attitudes and age. This could be because autonomy and belonging may tap into practical constraints beyond abstract issues like freedom or identity. For example, an influx of immigrants may cause locals to feel like they no longer belong in their own country, evoking realistic threats due to the possibility of social exclusion. Symbolic threats were also more significant than realistic threats in predicting negative attitudes. Therefore, it was concluded that intergroup hostility originates primarily as conflicts in abstract values rather than in tangible resources.
Overall, the study found that locals’ evaluations of immigrants are conditional on how useful immigrants are perceived to be towards locals’ goals and needs. When immigrants are seen as hindering locals’ fulfilment of their basic psychological needs, they are more likely to be perceived as threatening and therefore judged more negatively.
Read the article here.