Immigrant Threat and Prejudice: The Moderating Role of Cognitive Control

Decades of social psychological research has revealed a strong and positive association between immigrant threat and prejudice towards outgroups associated with immigration: When people feel threatened by immigrants (e.g., in their economic security, in their values and way of life), they are likely to respond in a prejudiced manner towards outgroups associated with immigration (e.g., Muslims, Romani people). In the light of these findings, the present study set out to explore factors that might mitigate the deleterious immigrant threat-immigrant prejudice relationship. Addressing this issue is timely and important, given the media coverage about Europe’s “migration crisis” in recent years. Building on prior work showing its prejudice?reducing effects, we focused on cognitive control (defined as the ability to regulate thoughts and actions in accordance with one’s prespecified plans and goals) as a candidate moderating variable. Specifically, we hypothesized that the immigrant threat-prejudice relationship would be curbed among those high (but not among those low) in cognitive control abilities.To investigate this research question, we collected a student sample (N = 228) and gauged their threat perceptions, their explicit and implicit prejudice towards three groups associated with immigration (i.e., immigrants, Muslims, Roma). To optimally characterize the relationship between our focal variables, we also included a range of relevant covariates, and we employed generalized additive models (GAMs) to find the best-fitting model of prejudice. Contrary to our expectations, no significant cognitive control x threat interactions emerged. Interestingly, our results also revealed some noteworthy non-linear relationships between a subset of our covariates and prejudice. Taken together, our results call for further research on this topic using more heterogenous samples, and for enhanced scholarly attention for non-linear relationships between prejudice and its covariates.