Ricerc@Sapienza

In the last decades, Western countries have witnessed increases in anti-immigrant prejudice as a consequence of increased immigration rates. Besides, the recent global threats (e.g., the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia-Ukraine war, etc.) have led people to experience uncertainty, which has been shown to turn into individuals' need to stick to their cognitions, restrict intergroup boundaries, and display prejudicial attitudes towards salient outgroups such as immigrants (e.g., Mula et al. 2021). In social psychology, prejudice has been addressed through the lens of different, independent theoretical perspectives. This contribution aims to bridge different theoretical accounts of prejudice to highlight anti-immigrant prejudice's complex, multifaceted antecedents. To this aim, relying on the social identity account of prejudice and its recent developments highlighting motivational underpinnings of social identification (Hogg. 2021), it will consider the role of national identity centrality (Wagogner et al., 2018) in conjunction with different levels factors that have been shown to be associated with anti-immigrant prejudice, such as contextual uncertainty due to situational threats (e.g., Conway et al., 2020), individual-level motivation to protect the ingroup (i.e., binding moral foundations; Graham et al., 2010), as well as cultural motivation in terms of desired cultural tightness (Gelfand et al., 2011; Jackson et al., 2019). Through three studies (2 correlational, 1 experimental), this project will test the novel hypothesized model of situational uncertainty leading to anti-immigrant prejudice (assessed in terms of general anti-immigrant attitudes, as well as subtle and explicit dehumanization) via the mediation on increased centrality of national identity (Hogg, 2021), leading in turn to the increased endorsement of ingroup protecting binding moral foundations (Graham et al., 2010) and increased desired cultural tightness (Gelfand et al., 2011).