Narratives shape cognitive representations of immigrants and policy preferences

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Eduardo Martinez ◽  
Lauren Feldman ◽  
Mallory Feldman ◽  
Mina Cikara
Keyword(s):  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
Policy Preferences ◽  
Cognitive Representations ◽  
Induced Representations ◽  
The Social

Scholars from across the social and media sciences have issued a clarion call to address a recent resurgence in criminalized characterizations of immigrants. Do these characterizations meaningfully impact individuals’ beliefs about immigrants and immigration? Across two online convenience samples (N = 1,054 adult U.S. residents), we applied a novel analytic technique to test how different narratives—criminal, achievement, struggle-oriented—impact cognitive representations of German, Russian, Syrian, and Mexican immigrants and the concept of “immigrants” in general. All stories featured male targets. Achievement stories homogenized individual immigrant representations whereas both criminal and struggle-oriented stories racialized them along a white/non-white axis: Germany clustered with Russia, Syria with Mexico. However, criminal stories were unique in making our most egalitarian participants’ representations as differentiated as our least egalitarian participants’. Narratives about individual immigrants also generalized to update representations of nationality groups. Most important, narrative-induced representations correlated with immigration policy preferences: achievement narratives and corresponding homogenized representations promoted preferences for less restriction, criminal narratives for more.

scholarly journals Narratives Shape Cognitive Representations of Immigrants and Immigration-Policy Preferences

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-152
Author(s):  
Joel E. Martinez ◽  
Lauren A. Feldman ◽  
Mallory J. Feldman ◽  
Mina Cikara
Keyword(s):  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
Policy Preferences ◽  
Cognitive Representations ◽  
Total N ◽  
Induced Representations ◽  
The Social

Scholars from across the social and media sciences have issued a clarion call to address a recent resurgence in criminalized characterizations of immigrants. Do these characterizations meaningfully impact individuals’ beliefs about immigrants and immigration? Across two online convenience samples (total N = 1,054 adult U.S. residents), we applied a novel analytic technique to test how different narratives—achievement, criminal, and struggle-oriented—impacted cognitive representations of German, Russian, Syrian, and Mexican immigrants and the concept of immigrants in general. All stories featured male targets. Achievement stories homogenized individual immigrant representations, whereas both criminal and struggle-oriented stories racialized them along a White/non-White axis: Germany clustered with Russia, and Syria clustered with Mexico. However, criminal stories were unique in making our most egalitarian participants’ representations as differentiated as our least egalitarian participants’. Narratives about individual immigrants also generalized to update representations of nationality groups. Most important, narrative-induced representations correlated with immigration-policy preferences: Achievement narratives and corresponding homogenized representations promoted preferences for less restriction, and criminal narratives promoted preferences for more.

Inner Contradiction to Immigration Quagmire: A Response to Rogers Smith

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 559-562
Author(s):  
Edwina Barvosa
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Economic Downturn ◽  
Mexican Immigrant ◽  
The Social ◽  
Unresolved Conflict ◽  
The U.S

The question of how to understand and address longstanding—and at times violent—hostility toward Mexican immigrants in the United States remains pressing. In his essay, Rogers Smith attempts to describe a just immigration policy, one that could ease anti-immigrant conflict, based on obligations upon the U.S. government that arise from its coercive shaping of the social identities and aspirations of Mexican immigrants. Smith is correct to focus on the conflicts between intersecting and contradictory factors that affect identity formation among immigrants, but I argue that a focus on similar conflicts among those who hold strong anti-immigrant views suggests that such contradictions may also be animating anti-Mexican immigrant hostility. Among the most important of these may be those arising from the American dream—a formative narrative that encourages euphoria about socioeconomic possibilities but that cloaks underlying economic instabilities, exploitation, and widespread vulnerabilities. The pain of these contradictions, typically unacknowledged by those whom they affect, can spike in times of economic downturn, exciting anti-Mexican immigrant sentiments that provide an outlet for the rage and agony of unresolved conflict.

scholarly journals Dogs recognize dog and human emotions

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 20150883 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Albuquerque ◽  
Kun Guo ◽  
Anna Wilkinson ◽  
Carine Savalli ◽  
Emma Otta ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Domestic Dogs ◽  
Emotional Expressions ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Auditory Cues ◽  
Cognitive Representations ◽  
Negative Valence ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
High Level

The perception of emotional expressions allows animals to evaluate the social intentions and motivations of each other. This usually takes place within species; however, in the case of domestic dogs, it might be advantageous to recognize the emotions of humans as well as other dogs. In this sense, the combination of visual and auditory cues to categorize others' emotions facilitates the information processing and indicates high-level cognitive representations. Using a cross-modal preferential looking paradigm, we presented dogs with either human or dog faces with different emotional valences (happy/playful versus angry/aggressive) paired with a single vocalization from the same individual with either a positive or negative valence or Brownian noise. Dogs looked significantly longer at the face whose expression was congruent to the valence of vocalization, for both conspecifics and heterospecifics, an ability previously known only in humans. These results demonstrate that dogs can extract and integrate bimodal sensory emotional information, and discriminate between positive and negative emotions from both humans and dogs.

scholarly journals Immigration Policy and the Rise of Self-Employment Among Mexican Immigrants

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes ◽  
Magnus Lofstrom ◽  
Chunbei Wang
Keyword(s):  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
Self Employment

Latina/o Immigration before 1965

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lilia Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
Puerto Ricans ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
The City ◽  
The U.S

This essay examines the migration of Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans to Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, long before the more widely recognized post-1965 immigration to the U.S. from Latin America. It argues that this pre-1965 migration to the Midwest was significant and played a critical role in establishing communities that would receive later migrants. In fact, by 1970, the city of Chicago officially counted nearly a quarter of a million Hispanics or Latinos in that year’s census. The essay examines how these populations became racialized as “non-white” in employment, housing, and the local enforcement and perceptions surrounding immigration policy.

Why Women Avoid the Radical Right: Internalized Norms and Party Reputations

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 369-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eelco Harteveld ◽  
Elisabeth Ivarsflaten
Keyword(s):  
Gender Gap ◽  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
Policy Preferences ◽  
Internal Motivation ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Radical Right Parties ◽  
Prejudice And Discrimination ◽  
The Uk ◽  
First Time

Radical Right Parties (RRPs) consistently attract more male than female voters. Puzzlingly, there is no equally consistent gender difference in policy preferences on the main issues of these parties – immigration and minority integration policies. Indeed, in some countries, for instance the UK, women have as restrictive immigration policy preferences as men, but are still less likely to vote for RRPs. This article proposes a novel answer to this gender gap puzzle that emphasizes the normative conflicts about prejudice and discrimination that surround RRPs across Europe. It uses representative survey data to show, for the first time, that women are more likely than men to be motivated to control prejudice, and that this difference in motivations has political consequences. More specifically, the study demonstrates that the higher prevalence of internal motivation to control prejudice among women accounts for the gender gap in voting for RRPs that become trapped in conflicts over discrimination and prejudice. Voting patterns for RPPs that have been able to defuse normative concerns about prejudice, such as the Progress Party currently in government in Norway, are different.

Assessing the Operationalization of Cultural Theory through Surveys Investigating the Social Aspects of Climate Change Policy Making

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 651-665 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Cambardella ◽  
Brian D. Fath ◽  
Andrea Werdenigg ◽  
Christian Gulas ◽  
Harald Katzmair
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Risk Perceptions ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Climate Change Policy ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Policy Preferences ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Change Policy ◽  
The Social

AbstractCultural theory (CT) provides a framework for understanding how social dimensions shape cultural bias and social relations of individuals, including values, view of the natural world, policy preferences, and risk perceptions. The five resulting cultural solidarities are each associated with a “myth of nature”—a concept of nature that aligns with the worldview of each solidarity. When applied to the problem of climate protection policy making, the relationships and beliefs outlined by CT can shed light on how members of the different cultural solidarities perceive their relationship to climate change and associated risk. This can be used to deduce what climate change management policies may be preferred or opposed by each group. The aim of this paper is to provide a review of how CT has been used in surveys of the social aspects of climate change policy making, to assess the construct validity of these studies, and to identify ways for climate change protection policies to leverage the views of each of the cultural solidarities to develop clumsy solutions: policies that incorporate strengths from each of the cultural solidarities’ perspectives. Surveys that include measures of at least fatalism, hierarchism, individualism, and egalitarianism and their associated myths of nature as well as measures of climate change risk perceptions and policy preferences have the highest translation and predictive validity. These studies will be useful in helping environmental managers find clumsy solutions and develop resilient policy according to C.S. Holling’s adaptive cycle.

scholarly journals Person (mis)perception: functionally biased sex categorization of bodies

2012 ◽  
Vol 279 (1749) ◽  
pp. 4982-4989 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerri L. Johnson ◽  
Masumi Iida ◽  
Louis G. Tassinary
Keyword(s):  
Social Perception ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Cognitive Representations ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Waist To Hip Ratio ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Affordances ◽  
Body Shapes ◽  
Average Body ◽  
Sex Categorization

Social perception is among the most important tasks that occur in daily life, and perceivers readily appreciate the social affordances of others. Here, we demonstrate that sex categorizations are functionally biased towards a male percept. Perceivers judged body shapes that varied in waist-to-hip ratio to be men if they were not, in reality, exclusive to women, and male categorizations occurred more quickly than female categorizations (studies 1 and 4). This pattern was corroborated when participants identified the average body shapes of men and women (study 2) and when we assessed participants' cognitive representations (study 3). Moreover, these tendencies were modulated by emotion context (study 4). Thus, male categorizations occurred readily and rapidly, demonstrating a pronounced categorization bias and temporal advantage for male judgements.

scholarly journals HOW DEEPLY DO WE INCLUDE ROBOTIC AGENTS IN THE SELF?

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (01) ◽  
pp. 1350015 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA STENZEL ◽  
ERIS CHINELLATO ◽  
ANGEL P. DEL POBIL ◽  
MARKUS LAPPE ◽  
ROMAN LIEPELT
Keyword(s):  
Simon Task ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cognitive Representations ◽  
Indirect Measure ◽  
Human Interactions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Report Data ◽  
High Degree

In human–human interactions, a consciously perceived high degree of self–other overlap is associated with a higher degree of integration of the other person's actions into one's own cognitive representations. Here, we report data suggesting that this pattern does not hold for human–robot interactions. Participants performed a social Simon task with a robot, and afterwards indicated the degree of self–other overlap using the Inclusion of the Other in the Self (IOS) scale. We found no overall correlation between the social Simon effect (as an indirect measure of self–other overlap) and the IOS score (as a direct measure of self–other overlap). For female participants we even observed a negative correlation. Our findings suggest that conscious and unconscious evaluations of a robot may come to different results, and hence point to the importance of carefully choosing a measure for quantifying the quality of human–robot interactions.

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