Reaching the conservatives who dehumanize immigrants most

What is it about?

Conservatives who hold the most negative, dehumanizing views of immigrants are often assumed to be the hardest group to reach with any intervention. This research tested whether that assumption holds. Across two experiments with 671 U.S. citizens, we asked participants to either imagine a brief, positive interaction with an immigrant (Mexican in Experiment 1, Muslim in Experiment 2) or imagine a neutral outdoor scene. We then measured each participant's political ideology, how much they dehumanized immigrants relative to their own group, and their support for immigrants. Both experiments showed the same pattern: imagining positive contact increased support for immigrants, but this increase was strongest, and sometimes only present, among conservative participants who dehumanized immigrants the most. Conservatives who already viewed immigrants as fully human, and liberals regardless of their dehumanization scores, showed little change either way. In the second experiment, we also measured positive emotions toward immigrants and found that the same pattern held, conservatives who dehumanized immigrants the most reported the largest gains in positive emotion after imagined contact. That shift in emotion was the mechanism explaining the increase in support.

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Photo by Erin Song on Unsplash

Photo by Erin Song on Unsplash

Why is it important?

A common assumption in intergroup relations research is that people who dehumanize an outgroup the most are also the most resistant to interventions designed to improve attitudes toward that group. Our findings challenge that assumption directly. Conservative individuals who scored highest on dehumanizing immigrants were not immovable, they were in fact the most responsive to a brief, low-cost imagined contact exercise. This matters for anyone designing interventions to reduce intergroup hostility in politically polarized contexts: it suggests that the people who seem hardest to reach may actually have the most room to shift, provided the intervention works through emotion rather than rational argument. Given the rise of explicitly dehumanizing rhetoric toward immigrants in public and political discourse, this offers a concrete, scalable starting point for practitioners working in contexts where direct, face-to-face contact between groups is limited or impractical.