EDUCATIONIMMIGRATION · Enlightened or just less threatened: Education and anti-immigrant attitudes

Enlightened or just less threatened: Education and anti-immigrant attitudes

People with higher levels of formal education express less negative attitudes towards immigrants and ethnic minorities. A popular explanation for this education effect is that education leads to moral enlightenment and that highly educated people are less prejudiced because they have a more developed sense of moral reasoning. Our project has shown in various ways that the moral enlightenment explanation is probably false and that the effect of education on prejudice is less impressive and has less positive consequences than is widely believed or hoped. First of all, we found that the education effect depends on how exactly prejudice is measured. When people are asked directly what their attitude is, higher educated people indeed report more positive attitudes compared to less educated people. This is a genuine effect that is not due to social desirability. However, we found that more spontaneous aspects of attitudes (measured using newly developed 'implicit' or 'indirect' measures) do not differ between less and higher educated people. As these spontaneous aspects of attitudes are likely to be related to discriminatory behaviour in many real-world circumstances, this result means that educational differences in discrimination of ethnic minorities or immigrants are probably much smaller than previously thought. Second, several studies supported the idea that the education effect has more to do with reduced economic threat than with increased moral enlightenment. Ethnic minorities and immigrants are often less skilled than average and thus compete for jobs with less educated (but not higher educated) citisens. We were the first to test this job threat explanation experimentally. In a series of experiments, we found that higher educated people held more negative attitudes towards higher educated immigrants compared to less educated immigrants. This effect was stronger when economic threat was made salient to the participants. We also conducted one study with an educationally diverse sample and found that the educational background of immigrants is part of the reason why higher educated people are less prejudiced towards immigrants. When we told people that immigrants did not have higher qualifications we found that less educated people felt more negative emotions towards immigrants than higher educated people. However, when immigrants were said to have higher qualifications, there was no difference between higher and less educated people in the negative emotions that they felt towards those immigrants. These results have implications for attitudes towards prejudiced people and for ways to reduce prejudice. If individuals are prejudiced because they are unable to understand the moral reasoning that leads to tolerance, possible reactions would include efforts to educate prejudiced people. Many schools run civic education programmes that try to achieve exactly that. If, however, individuals are prejudiced because they feel threatened regarding their opportunities to make a living (which is what our research suggests), it would be more effective to adopt measures that help them to achieve that goal. This would mean a move away from blaming individuals for prejudice and more attention to structural factors such as the labour market.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union