Narratives Shape Cognitive Representations of Immigrants and Immigration-Policy Preferences.

Scholars from across the social and media sciences have issued a clarion call to address a recent resurgence in criminalized characterizations of immigrants. Do these characterizations meaningfully impact individuals' beliefs about immigrants and immigration? Across two online convenience samples (total N = 1,054 adult U.S. residents), we applied a novel analytic technique to test how different narratives-achievement, criminal, and struggle-oriented-impacted cognitive representations of German, Russian, Syrian, and Mexican immigrants and the concept of immigrants in general. All stories featured male targets. Achievement stories homogenized individual immigrant representations, whereas both criminal and struggle-oriented stories racialized them along a White/non-White axis: Germany clustered with Russia, and Syria clustered with Mexico. However, criminal stories were unique in making our most egalitarian participants' representations as differentiated as our least egalitarian participants'. Narratives about individual immigrants also generalized to update representations of nationality groups. Most important, narrative-induced representations correlated with immigration-policy preferences: Achievement narratives and corresponding homogenized representations promoted preferences for less restriction, and criminal narratives promoted preferences for more.

Does cognitive dissonance occur in older age? A study of induced compliance in a healthy elderly population.

Does cognitive dissonance change as people age? Although cognitive dissonance has been one of the most widely studied theories in psychology, scant research has investigated the experience of dissonance over the life span and, to our knowledge, no prior research has investigated its effects in healthy older adults. The current study is the 1st empirical test of cognitive dissonance in an elderly population. We found that, consistent with dissonance theory, older adults showed effects of cognitive dissonance as measured by attitude differences in the direction of attitude-discrepant behavior in a classic induced compliance paradigm. Implications for the development of prohealth, dissonance-based interventions are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Influencing Republicans' and Democrats' attitudes toward Obamacare: Effects of imagined vicarious cognitive dissonance on political attitudes.

The field of experimental social psychology is appropriately interested in using novel theoretical approaches to implement change in the social world. In the current study, we extended cognitive dissonance theory by creating a new framework of social influence: imagined vicarious dissonance. We used the framework to influence attitudes on an important and controversial political attitude: U.S. citizens' support for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). 36 Republicans and 84 Democrats were asked to imagine fellow Republicans and Democrats, respectively, making attitude discrepant statements under high and low choice conditions about support for the ACA. The data showed that vicarious dissonance, established by imagining a group member make a counterattitudinal speech under high-choice conditions (as compared to low-choice conditions), resulted in greater support for the Act by Republicans and marginally diminished support by Democrats. The results suggest a promising role for the application of vicarious dissonance theory to relevant societal issues and for further understanding the relationship of dissonance and people's identification with their social groups.