Roots of group threat: anti-prejudice motivations and implicit bias in perceptions of immigrants as threats

ABSTRACT

The perception of “group threat” is well known to predict opposition to immigration and negative attitudes toward ethnic minorities in Europe. However, the relationship between group threat and prejudice remains unclear, theoretically and empirically. We offer a new lens for viewing this relationship, using a dual process model of prejudice to help explain individual perceptions of threat as a function of both implicit prejudice and explicit motivation to control or avoid prejudice. Using original survey data from Britain and Germany, we employ measures of explicit motivation to control prejudice (MCP), and implicit intergroup attitudes (measured by the affect misattribution procedure) that are novel in this context. We find that perceived threat is independently associated with implicit attitudes and both internal and, in Britain, external MCP. We thereby connect group threat theory with an updated individual-level model of prejudice.

KEYWORDS:

• Group threat
• immigration–public opinion
• implicit attitudes
• motivation
• prejudice
• dual process model

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Meredith Rolfe for leading the Oxford CCAP team and for discussions about this paper, and to Ray Duch and Iñaki Sagarzazu for organizing the surveys and documentation of data for the CCAP. We thank Paul Collins, Karam Dana, Rebecca Hamlin, Tatishe Nteta, Brian Schaffner, and Libby Sharrow for helpful comments at various stages. An early version of this paper was presented at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, April 2012.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by a John Fell Fund, University of Oxford small grant [no. 111/065].