A new study led by Yale University has found that fear of disloyalty drives members of a majority group to hold negative bias against minority group individuals who claim more than one identity.
The researchers wondered if the societal majority group had negative bias against immigrants, specifically those who prefer to hold dual identities — such as “Arab” and “American,” or “Jewish” and “American.” If so, why?
“Research from many parts of the world shows that most immigrants and minority-group members living in culturally diverse societies prefer to identify both with the nation they live in and the ethnic heritage groups they belong to,” said first author Jonas Kunst, a post-doctoral fellow at Yale.
“Members of the societal majority group, however, often dislike individuals who identify with two groups at the same time. In our research we were interested in the underlying reason for this bias.”
The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, comes at a time when hate crime is on the rise in the country.
In 2016, the most recent year for which the FBI has a report on U.S. hate crimes, out of 6,063 incidents, 57.5 percent were motivated by bias against a certain race, ethnicity or ancestry, and 21 percent were motivated by religious bias.
In a recent massacre of 11 innocent worshippers at a small synagogue in Pittsburgh, the suspect was reportedly driven by anti-Semitism.
The study
The researchers conducted five different studies.
In the first study, they recruited a total of 470 participants through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and provided just half of them with information about the 2015 ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California.
Then, they asked all the participants to assess the loyalty of a fictional immigrant named Mohammed, who they were told either identified as American only, or as both American and Arab.
The researchers only looked at responses from 348 participants who reported as White Americans and holding U.S. citizenship because the researchers defined this group as the socially dominant group.
They found that the participants belonging to the socially dominant group had significantly less favorable feelings toward the immigrant identifying as both American and Arab than an immigrant identifying solely as an American.
They also found that the negative bias was greater for the participants who had been given information of the San Bernardino terrorist attack as an example of an intergroup threat.
According to Kunst, these findings show that the majority group hold bias against dual-identifiers because they believe dual-identifiers are disloyal to the majority group. The majority group’s concerns of loyalty are driven by the perception of threat posed by dual-identifiers.
The other four subsequent studies, which used different scenarios, further confirmed these findings.
However, in one of the studies, the researchers found that the negative bias toward dual-identifiers could be disrupted under certain conditions.
After they had been told that the minority individual had risked his or her life for the majority group, the majority group participants had more positive feelings toward the minority-group members — even the individuals preferring two identities.
“People value loyalty and they tend to expect it from newcomers,” Kunst said in a statement. “This can be seen as a natural tendency that people show across contexts.”
Takeaway
The researchers believe that acknowledging the reason behind majority group’s suspicions toward minorities with dual identities can help improve dynamics between the two groups, as well as the treatment of immigrants and minorities.
“If the common assumption is that immigrant groups are disloyal to the nation they move to, challenging this assumption might offset this kind of skepticism and improve relations across societies,” Kunst said in a statement.
The researchers will continue studying how they can use their findings to create interventions to prevent such perceptions of disloyalty toward immigrants.
