Better or Worse by Comparison: How Immigrant Group Salience Affects Evaluations

• In Event: Elites, Media, and Immigration Opinion

Abstract

Building on recent findings showing reference frame dependence in social group evaluation, I demonstrate that citizen evaluations of immigrants do not only depend on immigrants’ own traits, but are also influenced by the salience (or non-salience) of other immigrant groups in the evaluation context. I develop a psychological model that shows how citizen preferences for different immigrant groups change as a function of each group’s salience in the mind of the evaluator. To test the predictions of this model, I develop a new technique to analyze conjoint experiments and apply this technique to a set of published experiments where respondents rated a set of randomly generated refugee or immigrant profiles. Taking advantage of the fact that conjoint experiments require respondents to evaluate many profiles in a randomized order, I show that viewing additional profiles of non-preferred immigrant groups has a positive causal effect on evaluations of preferred group profiles. On the other hand, considering more preferred group refugee profiles causes respondents to evaluate profiles from non-preferred groups more negatively. I further test the theory with an original survey experiment fielded in Chile that manipulates the salience of some immigrant groups before asking citizens to provide their opinion about others. All together, my findings indicate that reactions to specific immigrant groups are strongly influenced by the presence of other groups in a decision making environment, and give insight into the conditions under which these changes might be either positive or negative for members of a given immigrant group.

Author

• Reed Rasband, Harvard University