Ricerc@Sapienza

The aim of this research is to help understand why people have anti-immigrant attitudes; the necessity of this research should only increase in the future as immigration becomes even more common. Past research has found connections between need for cognitive closure with anti-immigrant attitudes (Brizi et al., 2015) and cultural binding (Federico et al., 2016). Taken separately this research cannot answer the question of why people have anti-immigrant attitudes. We propose to build on this research by assessing the indirect role that need for closure has on implicit and explicit anti-immigrant attitudes, as well as on anti-immigrant behaviors, through increased cultural binding. We propose that individuals who desire secure knowledge, that is, those individuals who are characterized by a need for closure, will resist immigration as immigrants represent an agent of change that can upset a foundation on which they build secure knowledge: the cultural systems, institutions, and groups to which they bind. Further, as we will control for political orientation in each study we will have evidence that this relationship is not merely an artifact of participants who hold politically conservative views. It is by studying need for cognitive closure in tandem with cultural binding and anti-immigrant attitudes and behaviors that we can arrive at a better answer for why these attitudes and behaviors are so popular. If we are able to understand this outcome subsequent research can study how these attitudes and behaviors can be reversed.
In conducting this research we will also advance the literatures on need for cognitive closure and cultural binding. As research has not yet found an association between cultural binding and prejudice against immigrants, this aspect is particularly important. On one hand, it may seem obvious that cultural binding and immigrant prejudice would go hand in hand. Immigrants, on one level, are outsiders to their host culture, and consequentially natives may view them with distrust. However, this is not necessarily the only way that these concepts can be associated. At least in the United States, there is the conception of the "melting pot" whereby immigrants can be welcomed into American culture. In this view, immigrants "melt" into their new culture while they simultaneously add elements of their culture of origin into the "pot". If this were the case then we would instead expect to find that cultural binding would be associated with positive attitudes towards immigrants. Our project can thus provide evidence for or against two conflicting roles of cultural binding in attitudes towards immigrants.
This project can also highlight an interesting facet of need for cognitive closure: the individual's stance towards change. As this concept is generally associated with the desire of knowledge that can be held with certainty, it follows that individuals characterized by need for cognitive closure would dislike changes made to strong, established environments, the kinds of environments that can serve as foundations for secure knowledge. This relationship has been observed in previous studies on attitude transmission in discussion groups (Livi et al., 2015) and in work-related attitudes of employees before and after a major organizational change (Kruglanski et al., 2007). We propose that this stance towards change can also be visible in attitudes and behaviors towards immigrants, and could highlight the need for research on this topic. In sum, this project adds to the existing literature in three ways: (1) by helping to explain why people hold anti-immigrant attitudes and engage in anti-immigrant behaviors, (2) by assessing the positive or negative role that binding to cultural systems, institutions, and groups has in these attitudes and behaviors, and (3) by highlighting the role of need for cognitive closure in stances towards change in established environments.