The Muted Consequences of Correct Information about Immigration

By Daniel Hopkins, J. Sides, J. Citrin. Journal of Politics, 2019

267 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Previous research shows that people commonly exaggerate the size of minority populations. Theories of intergroup threat predict that the larger people perceive minority groups to be, the less favorably they feel toward them. We investigate whether correcting Americans’ misperceptions about one such population—immigrants—affects related attitudes. We confirm that non-Hispanic Americans overestimate the percentage of the population that is foreign-born or in the United States without authorization. However, in seven separate survey experiments over 11 years, we find that providing accurate information does little to affect attitudes toward immigration, even though it does reduce the perceived size of the foreign-born population. This is true even when people’s misperceptions are explicitly corrected. These results call into question a potential cognitive mechanism that could underpin intergroup threat theory. Misperceptions about the size of minority groups may be a consequence, rather than a cause, of attitudes toward those groups.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/271e92ec3061733d5f767bb13ca45b637b6070d6

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Citations in the corpus

Labor market concerns and support for immigration (2020, result): “Our results differ from findings of previous experiments showing muted responses of policy preferences to information about the fraction of immigrants in the US (Hopkins et al., 2016; Sides and Citrin, 2007), or their characteristics (Grigorieff et al.”
Reshaping Adolescents' Gender Attitudes: Evidence from a School-Based Experiment in India (2018, background): “Compared to men and boys, women and girls have fewer educational opportunities, less autonomy in decisions about their marriage and fertility, and more restrictions on their labor market participation and even their physical mobility and friendships (Duflo 2012; Jayachandran 2015).”
Facts and Myths about Misperceptions (2020, background): “Similarly, Hopkins et al. (2019) find across seven studies that providing information about the actual number of immigrants (which people often exaggerate) has little effect on attitudes toward immigration policy.”
Designing Information Provision Experiments (2020, background): “, 2016), their support for immigration (Alesina et al., 2018a; Bansak et al., 2016; Barrera et al., 2020; Facchini et al., 2016; Grigorieff et al., 2020; Haaland and Roth, 2020; Hopkins et al., 2019; Lergetporer et al., 2017), their tendency to discriminate against immigrants (Alesina et al.”