Losing Status and Entitativity: How Population Shifts Affect Attitudes Toward Immigrants via Social Identity Threats

Many Western countries’ populations have been diversifying due to the decline of ethnic majority groups coupled with an increase in ethnic minority populations. Previous studies established that such demographic changes can result in negative attitudes toward immigrants via elevated status threat to the ethnic majority group. Drawing from social identity theory and uncertainty-identity theory, two studies were conducted to examine whether population shift can elicit anti-immigration sentiment via the elevated entitativity threat to American national identity in addition to the threat to Whites’ status (H1). Study 1 ( N = 297) examined H1 using a between-subjects design in which participants were either reminded of U.S. population shifts or irrelevant information before answering questions on anti-immigration attitudes. Study 2 ( N = 480) examined the causal link between the two threat mediators and the DVs described in H1 by directly manipulating status and entitativity threats using a manipulation shown to be effective in a pilot study ( N = 155). American identity centrality was also measured to examine whether it interacts with the two threats to affect anti-immigration attitudes (H2). Study 1’s results supported H1. However, Study 2 failed to support H2. The predicted three-way interaction and all two-way interactions were insignificant. Primed status threat and entitativity threat had no significant main effects. Exploratory analyses were conducted by regressing the DVs onto measured status threat, measured entitativity threat, and American identity centrality. Results reveal that the positive association between measured entitativity threat and anti-immigration sentiment was only significant under high (vs. low) status threat. Implications on how social identity threats underpin the impacts of population shift on immigration-related attitudes are discussed.