Is increasing diversity inherently threatening? Depends on the policies.

Dr. Judit Kende (Université libre de Bruxelles)

Our social world is becoming increasingly diverse. Some studies demonstrate that the native ethnic majority population might respond to the increasing presence of immigrants by feeling threatened. threatening for the. Similarly, recent papers show that drawing the attention of White majority participants to the increasing proportion of ethnic minority members in society exacerbates their perceptions of threat and negative emotions. We contest that increasing diversity would be inherently threatening and examine whether more egalitarian policies could attenuate such perceptions of threat.

We conducted 5 studies to examine the interplay of policies and changes in diversity or immigrant presence. We systematically manipulated perceptions of increasing diversity and perceptions of policies and measured the effect of actual immigrant presence and actual immigrant integration policies. Studies 1 (N=469), 2 (N=733) & 3 (N=839) were implemented in the US and use experimental methods. In Studies 4 (N=200185) and 5 (k=311 countryyears) we implemented secondary analysis of survey data comparing different European countries. In each study we focused our analysis on the White majority native participants.

Overall, the results show that when policies give more equal rights to immigrants, native participants feel less threatened or not at all threatened by increasing diversity. Furthermore, egalitarian policies are especially consequential in highly diverse environments.

The seminar will take place in our seminar room and online in this virtual room.