Prejudice against International Students: The Role of Threat Perceptions and Authoritarian Dispositions in U.S. Students

ABSTRACT

International students provide a variety of benefits to higher education institutions within the United States (J. J. Lee, 2007; J. J. Lee & C. Rice, 2007). Despite these benefits, many international students experience prejudice and discrimination by American students. The purpose of the present study was to examine several potential predictors of prejudice against international students: perceptions of international students as symbolic and realistic threats, right-wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation. A simultaneous regression analysis that the authors based on 188 students at a Southwestern university revealed that perceptions of symbolic and realistic threats and social dominance orientation were each positive and significant predictors of prejudice. Mediation analyses suggested that the effects of right-wing authoritarianism on prejudice is fully mediated through perceived symbolic threat and partially mediated by realistic threat.

Keywords:

• international students
• realistic threat
• right-wing authoritarianism
• social dominance orientation
• symbolic threat

Acknowledgments

The present research was based on the first author's thesis project under the supervision of the second author.

Notes

**p < .001.

1. Riek et al. (2006) provided a slightly more descriptive account of realistic threats. According to those authors, realistic threats are those that stem from “perceptions of competition, conflicting goals, and threats to physical as well as economic well-being of the ingroup” (p. 336).

2. Due to the strong correlation between the two threat measures in our sample, we conducted additional mediation analyses after generating residualized scores for perceived symbolic and realistic threats, respectively. Sobel tests of the indirect effect of RWA on prejudice via symbolic threat (residualized for realistic threat) and realistic threat (residualized for symbolic threat) yielded the same conclusions as our primary analyses. The indirect effect of RWA on prejudice via our residualized symbolic threat measure was statistically significant (Z = 3.140, p = .002), as was the indirect effect of RWA on prejudice via our residualized realistic threat measure (Z = 2.071, p = .038).

3. In addition to testing for mediation between RWA and prejudice, we also conducted additional mediation analyses by including SDO as a predictor of prejudice (as recommended by a reviewer). For the unresidualized measures, the indirect effects of SDO on prejudice via symbolic and realistic threats were both significant (both ps < .001). Using our residualized threat measures, however, we found that the effect of SDO on prejudice via symbolic threat was statistically significant (Z = 2.702, p = .007), whereas the indirect effect of SDO via realistic threat was not (Z = 1.869, p = .062).

4. Stenner (2005) nicely summed up authoritarianism as a “personal distaste for difference” (p. 17).