Abstract
We examine the extent to which relevant social identity traits shared between two individuals—what we term “attribute affinity”—can moderate out-group hostility. We argue that in-group affinity is a powerful force in shaping preferences over potential immigrants. We focus on two closely related, yet distinct, dimensions of identity: religion and religiosity. Using evidence from three surveys that included two embedded experiments, we show that sharing strength in religious practice can diminish strong aversion to immigrants of different religious affiliations. We find that, among highly religious U.S. natives, anti-Muslim bias is lower toward very religious Muslims, compared to non-religious Muslims. This attenuating effect of attribute affinity with respect to religiosity on anti-Muslim bias presents the strongest evidence supporting our argument.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In fact, irrespective of other abilities, most natives prefer potential immigrants with high skill levels (using level of education as a proxy for skill). These studies find that highly skilled immigrants are preferred to low-skilled immigrants, regardless of a native’s own skill level, suggesting that this preference is not driven by different levels of threat perception about one’s own job.
Political scientists also incorporate social identity into studies of public opinion. Most notably, Kinder and Kam (2009) focus on what they argue is a tendency to “divide the world into in groups and out groups” or ethnocentrism (76). For instance, the authors argue that high levels of ethnocentrism among U.S. natives drive negative attitudes toward immigrants.
Although drawing from common in-group identity, our argument is not about any aspect of identity becoming superordinate or recategorized – instead we suggest that simply the recognition of shared characteristics on one dimension may override aversion along another.
In this study, we use frequency of attendance at religious services as a proxy for religiosity. To test its validity, we correlated frequency of attendance with other measures of religiosity. See footnote 19 for details.
Though, as we note below, such a pattern does not hold for individuals from “outsider” religions, such as Muslims in the present day.
While attitudes toward Muslims tend to differ by political affiliation, Americans on both sides of the aisle support keeping Muslims out of the country or subjecting them to additional surveillance (Sides and Mogahed 2018). The same survey evidence suggests that Americans view Muslims as religious and believe they hold outdated views of women, gays, and lesbians.
Attitudes toward Muslims have likely been influenced by the September 11, 2001 events and the resulting portrayal of Muslims in the media, where they are frequently associated with threatening images of terrorists (Cimino 2005; Oswald 2005; Putnam 2002; Schildkraut 2002; Shaheen 2003). It should be noted that Creighton and Jamal (2015) find that U.S. natives are equally opposed to Muslim and Christian immigrants. While U.S. Christians are explicitly biased against Muslim immigrants, they also hold implicit biases against Christian immigrants of specific nationalities and ethnicities.
YouGov interviewed 1089 respondents from May 2 to May 6, 2013. Then, respondents were matched down to a sample of 1000 to produce the final dataset. The respondents were matched on gender, age, race, education, party identification, ideology, and political interest. Using the 2010 American Community Survey, YouGov then weighted the matched set of survey respondents to known characteristics of the general population of the U.S.
We emphasized that we were solely concerned with legal immigrants to rule out natives’ attitudes toward illegal immigrants, which may be driven by other socially undesirable characteristics (Wright et al. 2015).
We oversampled religious respondents on MTurk using contacts from previous studies on religion because, in general, respondents on MTurk are less likely to be affiliated with a religion than the overall United States population (Berinsky et al. 2012).
SSI recruits participants through various online communities, social networks, and website advertisements. SSI makes efforts to recruit hard-to-reach groups, such as ethnic minorities and seniors. These potential participants are then screened and invited into the panel. When deploying a particular survey, SSI randomly selects panel participants for survey invitations. We did not employ quotas but asked SSI to recruit a target population that matched the (18 and over) 2010 census population on education, gender, age, geography, and income (based on the premeasured profile characteristics of the respondents). The resulting sample is not a probability sample but a diverse national sample. SSI samples have been used in a number of recent publications in political science.
Hainmueller et al. (2015) test several vignette experimental designs and find advantages to both measures, both in terms of their accuracy in calculating effects and predicting real life outcomes.
We selected major world religions: Christianity (Catholic and Protestant denominations), Islam, and Hinduism. We also included atheists and Jews because we wanted enough variation in our variable of interest and, particularly, enough variation in religious affiliation for each country of origin in our experiment.
Although we assigned the attribute-levels at random, we included one restriction over the possible profiles that the respondents saw. “Atheist” is one of the levels of the religion attribute and it is unrealistic to present respondents with atheist immigrants who attended religious services. Therefore, we restricted the possible combinations of immigrants such that atheist immigrants would always “Never” attend religious services. Hainmueller et al. (2014) state that the randomization of profiles (an identification assumption in conjoint analysis), requires that the randomization scheme assign a non-zero probability to all the possible attribute combinations for which the potential outcomes are defined. Because the control observation for each attribute-level is all other attribute-levels, removing theoretically problematic combinations makes it impossible to analyze causal quantities for these attribute-levels. We are not particularly concerned, as these combinations are not crucial for our results.
Immigrants’ religions were: Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, Muslim, atheist/agnostic, Hindu or Buddhist, and Eastern or Greek Orthodox.
Psychologists have long known that individuals often fail to accurately report their underlying mental processes (Nisbett and Wilson 1977). When individuals are asked to report their cognitive processes, they often do so on the basis of a priori judgments. Our results demonstrate that irrespective of the stated importance of religion, respondents’ own religion greatly influenced their preferences.
Because our treatment and outcome variables are binary (either an immigrant has or does not have an attribute and a respondent either accepts one or the other immigrant), the linear regression estimator is fully nonparametric.
The relatively small sample size of United States respondents identifying with the smaller religions randomly assigned to the immigrant profiles (Hinduism, Islam) prevent us from drawing inferences about these groups.
We additionally tested whether our measure of religiosity (attendance at religious services) corresponds to the salience of religiosity as an identity. In our YouGov—religion survey, we asked respondents how important religion is in their lives (“Extremely important”,“Very important”,“Somewhat important”,“Not very important”,“Not at all important”). Figure 1 in the Supporting Information shows that our measure of religiosity is highly correlated with self-reported levels of importance of religion, suggesting that our measure is capturing both the strength and salience of religiosity.
We exclude atheists from both the respondent sample and immigrant profiles since they are not considered religious people. However, the results do not change if atheists are included.
We ran another similar experiment in 2015 where we included an additional treatment arm that presented respondents with a Muslim immigrant without any information about religiosity. The experiment presented respondents with two immigrant profiles sequentially. We managed to replicate our results as we did with the conjoint analysis only in the first period, not the second. We find that, in line with our theory of attribute affinity, religious respondents prefer religious over non-religious Muslims. However, we are careful in interpreting these results because of their instability (see Supporting Information for details). Although we cannot explain this instability, we suspect that events relating to Islamic extremism that occurred between our experiments, such as the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the increased media coverage of the Islamic State, may have influenced our respondents’ answers in ways we did not anticipate. However, given the strong findings from our first two experiments—conducted using different methods on different samples—we are confident that the initial results we report in this paper are not simply statistical flukes.
The findings in this sample cannot rule out that this pattern is particular to religious Catholic respondents because in the full sample of religious respondents there is a slight preference for religious Muslims over non-religious Muslim immigrants (difference in means of 0.06, p-value = 0.86), but the difference is not statistically distinguishable from zero.
Similar to the MTurk–religion/religiosity experiment, we asked respondents to rate each immigrant on a 7-point scale (see Fig. 1). Including atheists that report attending religious services does not change the results.
The difference in means between religious respondents’ evaluations of religious and non-religious Muslims is practically the same size as when measured using a 7 point scale rating dependent variable and is significant at \(p < 0.08\).
Instead of seven pairs, we showed 10 pairs of profiles to respondents of minority religions such as Mormons, Greek Orthodox, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and atheists. Therefore, when we pool all religious respondents, we are in fact over-representing these religions relative to their population size. We ran the analyses both with all profiles and as well as with just the first seven that each respondent saw. The results do not change with the modification in the sample size.
We designed the SSI–conjoint experiment in 2014 to specifically test our theory on religion and religiosity, but we also use the data to test the relevance of attribute affinity with respect to other interactive aspects of identity-specifically, between race on the one hand and language skills on the other. We find that although the statistical significance fails to reach standard levels, attribute affinity mitigates negative reactions in these cases. Although only suggestive, this evidence further strengthens our theory and emphasizes the importance of studying the effect of the interaction of different identity attributes on attitudes toward out-groups.
References
Adida, C. L., Laitin, D. D., & Valfort, M.-A. (2015). Religious homophily in a secular country: Evidence from a voting game in France. Economic Inquiry, 53(2), 1187–1206.
Adida, C. L., Laitin, D. D., & Valfort, M.-A. (2016). Why Muslim integration fails in Christian-heritage societies. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Adida, C. L., Laitin, D., & Valfort, M.-A. (2013). Region of origin or religion? Understanding why immigrants from Muslim-majority countries are discriminated against in Western Europe. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2324280.
Bloom, B.-N., Pazit, G. A., & Courtemanche, M. (2015). Religious social identity, religious belief, and anti-immigration sentiment. American Political Science Review, 109(2), 203–221.
Berinsky, A. J., Huber, G. A., & Lenz, G. S. (2012). Evaluating online labor markets for experimental research: Amazon.com’s mechanical turk. Political Analysis, 20(3), 351–368.
Bobo, L. (1983). Whites’ opposition to busing: Symbolic racism or realistic group conflict? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(6), 1196–1210.
Brader, T., Valentino, N. A., & Suhay, E. (2008). What triggers public opposition to immigration? Anxiety, group cues, and immigration threat. American Journal of Political Science, 52(4), 959–978.
Brewer, M. B. (1979). In-group bias in the minimal intergroup situation: A cognitive-motivational analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 86(2), 307–324.
Brewer, M. B. (1999). The psychology of prejudice: Ingroup love or outgroup hate? Journal of Social Issues, 55(3), 429–444.
Brewer, M. B. (2007). The importance of being we: Human nature and intergroup relations. American Psychologist, 62(8), 728.
Chandra, K. (2012). Constructivist theories of ethnic politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cimino, R. (2005). No god in common: American evangelical discourse on Islam after 9/11. Review of Religious Research, 47(2), 162–174.
Citrin, J., Green, D. P., Muste, C., & Wong, C. (1997). Public opinion toward immigration reform: The role of economic motivations. The Journal of Politics, 59(3), 858–881.
Citrin, J., & Wright, M. (2009). Defining the circle of we: American identity and immigration policy. The Forum, 7(3), 1–20.
Creighton, M. J., & Jamal, A. (2015). Does Islam play a role in anti-immigrant sentiment? An experimental approach. Social Science Research, 53, 89–103.
Crisp, R. J., & Hewstone, M. (2007). Multiple social categorization. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 163–254.
Dancygier, R. M., & Donnelly, M. J. (2013). Sectoral economies, economic contexts, and attitudes toward immigration. The Journal of Politics, 75(1), 17–35.
Daniels, J. P., & Von Der Ruhr, M. (2005). God and the global economy: Religion and attitudes towards trade and immigration in the United States. Socio-Economic Review, 3(3), 467–489.
Dovidio, J. F., Gaertner, S. L., Validzic, A., Matoka, K., Johnson, B., & Frazier, S. (1997). Extending the benefits of recategorization: Evaluations, self-disclosure, and helping. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 33(4), 401–420.
Dunning, T., & Harrison, L. (2010). Cross-cutting cleavages and ethnic voting: An experimental study of cousinage in Mali. American Political Science Review, 104(1), 21–39.
Fetzer, J. S. J., & Soper, C. (2003). The roots of public attitudes toward state accommodation of European Muslims’ religious practices before and after September 11. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 42(2), 247–258.
Foner, N., & Alba, R. (2008). Immigrant religion in the US and Western Europe: Bridge or barrier to inclusion? International Migration Review, 42(2), 360–392.
Ford, R, Morrell, G., & Heath, A. (2012). Fewer but better? Public views about immigration. The British Social Attitudes, 26–44.
Gaertner, S. L., & Dovidio, J. F. (2000). Reducing intergroup bias: The common ingroup identity model. London: Psychology Press.
Green, J. C. (2007). The faith factor: How religion influences American elections. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group.
Guth, J. L., & Green, J. C. (1993). Salience: The core concept. In D. C. Leege & L. A. Kellstadt (Eds.), Rediscovering the religious factor in American politics (pp. 157–174). Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe.
Hainmueller, J., Hopkins, D. J., & Yamamoto, T. (2014). Causal inference in conjoint analysis: Understanding multidimensional choices via stated preference experiments. Political Analysis, 22(1), 1–30.
Hainmueller, Jens, Hangartner, Dominik, & Yamamoto, Teppei. (2015). Validating vignette and conjoint survey experiments against real-world behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences United States of Americs, 112(8), 2395–2400.
Hainmueller, J., & Hiscox, M. J. (2010). Attitudes toward highly skilled and low-skilled immigration: Evidence from a survey experiment. American Political Science Review, 104(1), 61–84.
Hainmueller, J., Hiscox, M. J., & Margalit, Y. (2015). Do concerns about labor market competition shape attitudes toward immigration? New evidence. Journal of International Economics, 97(1), 193–207.
Hanson, G. H., Scheve, K., & Slaughter, M. J. (2007). Public finance and individual preferences over globalization strategies. Economics & Politics, 19(1), 1–33.
Harell, A., Soroka, S. N., Iyengar, S. (2011). Attitudes toward immigration and immigrants: The impact of economic and cultural cues in the US and Canada. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1901722.
Kalkan, O. K., Layman, G. C., & Uslaner, E. M. (2009). Bands of others? Attitudes toward Muslims in contemporary American society. The Journal of Politics, 71(3), 847–862.
Kenworthy, J. B., Canales, C. J., Weaver, K. D., & Miller, N. (2003). Negative incidental affect and mood congruency in crossed categorization. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39(3), 195–219.
Kinder, D. R., & Kam, C. D. (2009). Us against them: The ethnocentric foundations of American opinion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Kinder, D. R., & Sears, D. O. (1981). Prejudice and politics: Symbolic racism versus racial threats to the good life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40(3), 414.
Knoll, B. R. (2009). And who is my neighbor? Religion and immigration policy attitudes. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 48(2), 313–331.
Layman, G. C. (1997). Religion and political behavior in the United States: The impact of beliefs, affiliations, and commitment from 1980 to 1994. Public Opinion Quarterly, 61(2), 288–316.
Malhotra, N., Margalit, Y. M., & Mo, C. H. (2013). Economic explanations for opposition to immigration: Distinguishing between prevalence and conditional impact. American Journal of Political Science, 57(2), 391–410.
Margolis, M. F. (2018). How far does social group influence reach? Identities, elites, and immigration attitudes. The Journal of Politics, 80(3), 000–000.
Mayda, A. M. (2006). Who is immigration? A cross-country investigation of individual attitudes toward immigrants. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 88(3), 510–530.
McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1), 415–444.
Mockabee, S. T., Monson, J. Q., & Grant, J. T. (2001). Measuring religious commitment among Catholics and Protestants: A new approach. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 40(4), 675–690.
Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231.
O’Rourke, K. H., & Sinnott, R. (2006). The determinants of individual attitudes towards immigration. European Journal of Political Economy, 22(4), 838–861.
Oswald, D. L. (2005). Understanding anti-arab reactions post-9/11: The role of threats, social categories, and personal ideologies. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 35(9), 1775–1799.
Putnam, R. D. (2002). Bowling together. The American Prospect, 13(3), 20–22.
Riek, B. M., Mania, E. W., Gaertner, S. L., McDonald, S. A., & Lamoreaux, M. J. (2010). Does a common ingroup identity reduce intergroup threat? Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 13(4), 403–423.
Scheve, K. F., & Slaughter, M. J. (2001). Labor market competition and individual preferences over immigration policy. Review of Economics and Statistics, 83(1), 133–145.
Schildkraut, D. J. (2002). The more things change... American identity and mass and elite responses to 9/11. Political Psychology, 23(3), 511–535.
Sears, D. O., Sidanius, J., & Bobo, L. (2000). Racialized politics: The debate about racism in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Shaheen, J. G. (2003). Reel bad arabs: How hollywood vilifies a people. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 588(1), 171–193.
Sherif, M. (1966). Group conflict and co-operation: Their social psychology. London: Routledge & K. Paul.
Sides, J., & D, Mogahed. (2018). Muslims in America: Public perceptions in the Trump Era. Washington, DC: Arab American Institute.
Sniderman, P. M., & Hagendoorn, A. (2007). When ways of life collide: Multiculturalism and its discontents in the Netherlands. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Strabac, Z., & Listhaug, O. (2008). Anti-Muslim prejudice in Europe: A multilevel analysis of survey data from 30 countries. Social Science Research, 37(1), 268–286.
Tajfel, H. (1982). Social psychology of intergroup relations. Annual Review of Psychology, 33(1), 1–39.
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–37). Monterey, CA: Brooks-Cole.
Vanman, E. J., Paul, B. Y., Ito, T. A., & Miller, N. (1997). The modern face of prejudice and structural features that moderate the effect of cooperation on affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(5), 941–959.
Worchel, S., Rothgerber, H., Day, E. A., Hart, D., & Butemeyer, J. (1998). Social and identity and individual productivity within groups. The British Journal of Social Psychology, 37(4), 389–413.
Wright, M., Levy, M., & Citrin, J. (2016). Public attitudes toward immigration policy across the legal/illegal divide: The role of categorical and attribute-based decision-making. Political Behavior, 38(1), 229–253.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Elisha Heaps contributed to the conception and early data collection for this paper. The remaining authors contributed equally to the paper.
For comments, the authors are grateful to Daniel de Kadt, Nicolas Dumas, James Dunham, Daniel Hopkins, Jonathan Phillips, Kyle Shohfi, Michael Tessler, Cara Wong, three anonymous reviewers, as well as participants at MPSA 2014, Harvard's Working Group in Political Psychology 2014, MIT's Political Experiments Research Lab 2014, and George Washington University. Leah Rosenzweig gratefully acknowledges support through the ANR Labex IAST.
Data and supporting materials necessary to reproduce the numerical results in the article are available in the Political Behavior Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/polbehavior).
Electronic supplementary material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Berinsky, A.J., Rizzo, T., Rosenzweig, L.R. et al. Attribute Affinity: U.S. Natives’ Attitudes Toward Immigrants. Polit Behav 42, 745–768 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9518-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9518-9