Replication Data for: Family Matters: How immigrant histories can promote inclusion

Immigration is a highly polarized issue in the United States, and negative attitudes toward immigrants are common. Yet, almost all Americans are descended from people who originated outside the country, a narrative often evoked by the media and taught in school curricula. Can this narrative increase inclusionary attitudes toward migrants? We draw from scholarship showing that perspective-taking decreases prejudice toward outgroups to investigate whether reminding Americans about their own immigration history increases support for immigrants and immigration. We propose that priming family experiences can indirectly stimulate perspective-taking and induce empathy toward the outgroup, which we test with three separate survey experiments conducted over two years. Our findings show that priming family history generates small but consistent inclusionary effects. These effects occur even among partisan subgroups and Americans who approve of President Trump. We provide evidence that increased empathy for immigrants constitutes one mechanism driving these effects.

移民议题在美国是极具极化性的争议议题，公众对移民群体持有负面态度的情况颇为常见。然而，几乎所有美国人的祖先均源自海外，这一叙事常被媒体援引，并被纳入学校课程体系进行讲授。那么这一叙事能否提升公众对移民的包容态度？
我们依托相关学术研究——该研究表明观点采择（perspective-taking）能够降低对外群体（outgroup）的偏见——展开研究，探讨提醒美国人铭记自身的移民历史，是否会提升其对移民及移民政策的支持度。我们提出，启动（priming）家庭经历相关的记忆，可间接激发观点采择能力，并唤起对外群体的共情；我们通过两年间开展的三项独立调查实验对这一假设进行了验证。
研究结果显示，启动家族移民历史记忆能够产生虽小幅但持续的包容效应，且该效应在党派分歧群体以及支持特朗普总统的美国民众中均有体现。
我们的研究证实，对移民共情水平的提升是驱动上述效应的核心机制之一。