Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in the Endorsement of Asylum Seeker Policies in Australia
Moral disengagement is a process whereby the self-regulatory mechanisms that would otherwise sanction unethical conduct can be selectively disabled. The present research proposed that moral disengagement might be adopted in the endorsement of asylum seeker policies in Australia, and in order to test this, developed and validated a scale in two studies. Factor analysis demonstrated that a two-factor, 16-item structure had the best fit, and the construct validity of the scale was supported. Results provide evidence for the use of moral disengagement in the context of asylum seekers as a means of rationalizing conduct that may otherwise be sanctioned.
Ambivalent attitudes about teaching children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
Drawing on attitude theories from social psychology, we conducted a survey of Australian pre-service (n = 327) and in-service (n = 127) teachers' attitudes about teaching children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This paper reports a content analysis of beliefs, affect and behaviours towards teaching children with ADHD and quantitative analyses pertaining to attitudinal ambivalence - that is, where a teacher may simultaneously report negative and positive evaluations of teaching children with ADHD. While on average, overall or global attitudes were mildly positive for both cohorts, considerable ambivalence about teaching children with ADHD was commonly experienced. Participants reported ambivalent beliefs, affect and behaviours, as well as ambivalence between these attitude components. Paradoxically, participants who knew more about ADHD and held stronger positive global attitudes about teaching children with ADHD reported less ambivalent behaviours towards these children, but reported more ambivalent beliefs. The implications for teachers' professional development and training are discussed.
More than 650 refugees arrived in this regional town. Locals' welcoming attitudes flipped the stereotype
Over four years, we examined a regional town's attitudes before and after hundreds of refugees settled in the area. Our surveys found residents of Armidale, in northeastern New South Wales, started out reasonably positive about the settlement program, and became even more so.
Over time, they had fewer concerns about the impact of refugees on the town, more contact with the refugees, and more positive attitudes towards refugees and the settlement program.
Technological and analytical advancements in intergroup contact research
The prolific expansion of intergroup contact research has established that intergroup interactions are tightly linked to social integration. In this review, recent technological and statistical innovations with the potential to advance this body of research are presented. First, concerns over the validity of longitudinal models are discussed before innovative analytical techniques are introduced that explore change over time. Next, intensive repeated measure designs, such as experience sampling approaches, are introduced as opportunities to investigate the day‐to‐day lives of individuals. Virtual reality technology is then presented as another means to examine naturalistic contact experiences in the laboratory, offering researchers an unrivaled capacity to induce uncommon contact experiences. Finally, we propose that additional sources of contextual data, such as competing media messages, could extend these models in innovative ways by accounting for the time and place surrounding intergroup contact. Similarly, longitudinal social network analysis can provide additional contextual information by considering the broader network environment in which contact occurs. We describe these innovations with the intention of spurring future research that will advance our understanding of how intergroup contact can be used to improve our societies. Thus, we conclude with a discussion on how to bridge divides between researchers and practitioners.
Implicit Measures in Applied Contexts: An Illustrative Examination of Antiracism Advertising
The earliest research on attitude formation and change was inspired by important social problems. What factors can cause people to like each other in social housing? How can people be made to remain favorable to the war against the Third Reich? How can we reduce prejudice? The list of applied research on attitude formation and change has grown over the years and now examines issues in the formation and change of attitudes toward a variety of objects, policies and behaviors. These include employment (e.g., job satisfaction, organizational commitment), health promotion (e.g., food attitude, sunscreen use), politics (e.g., campaign design, policy preference), product consumption (e.g., brand preference, methods of marketing), the environment (e.g., recycling, reduction of consumption) and sexual behavior (e.g., condom use), among other topics. It is now safe to say that the volume of applied research on attitude formation and change is truly enormous and important.
The Role of Culture and Racial Appearance when Majority Group Members Form Impressions of Immigrant Racial Minority Groups
Race and enculturation are often inextricably linked when investigating how impressions are formed of others. Race has long been held as a “primitive” category, along with age and sex. It has been included as a primitive category because, like a person’s age and sex, it is seen to be immediately discernible as a category upon which we can base assessments of, and form impressions about, others. It is also the basis of social problems such as racial prejudice and racial discrimination, and often incorrect assumptions about individuals and groups are made based on racial stereotypes. This is a serious problem in a world that has increasing immigration and globalisation. The present research investigated how host societies assess immigrants to their country, and how majority group members form impressions of minority group members. Established theories of multiculturalism, acculturation, stereotypes and nonverbal accent have been sourced upon which to base examination of the roles that race and culture play in assessments of immigrant minority groups living in countries with racially and culturally different majorities.
The first chapter introduces concepts and theories of race, enculturation, multiculturalism, acculturation, and stereotyping. It introduces the theory of nonverbal accent and its potential for revealing subtle cues about enculturation. A review of the literature on the effects of race and culture as cues for categorising others provides background information for the overarching research question of this thesis: can culture override racial appearance when majority groups form impressions of racial minority outgroups? Six separate empirical studies were conducted to arrive at the results which are reported in journal article format and comprise three separate journal articles reported in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. The final chapter incorporates the overall findings which are discussed in terms of relevance to modern immigrant societies.
The first article, which is presented as Chapter 2, reports two separate studies conducted in Australia. Both studies explored the attitudes of the host population towards immigrants of different racial appearances who adopted various acculturation strategies when settling into Australia, investigating the influence of race and culture on impression formation. In Study 1 (N=142) survey results demonstrated a strong effect of acculturation strategy on the impressions formed about the immigrant targets, while racial appearance had no effect. The second study (N = 1,051) intended to repeat the findings of the first study but with a more broadly representative sample of Australians. This study also removed the national labels that were offered in the first study, to reduce the possibility that ratings could be based on national stereotypes rather than race. Results confirmed that the acculturation strategy adopted by the immigrant targets was more influential than race in how participants rated them, and that integration and assimilation were the most favoured acculturation strategies.
The next article (Chapter 3) sought to understand how Australians see themselves as a people. National self-stereotypes (descriptors that national ingroup members use to describe the character of their own nation) have been found to be stable over time and resilient to change (Wilson, 2006; Lueptow, Garovich-Szabo, & Lueptow, 2001; Kawakami & Dovidio, 2001). However, they have also been found to be unstable and influenced by the political and social climate in which they are found (Haslam, Oakes, Reynolds, Mein, 1999). Chapter 3 reports a survey which was conducted on 157 Australians to assess current self-stereotypes. The aim was to assess the current self-stereotypes nominated by Australians, and to ascertain if consensus about the stereotypes Australians attribute to themselves has changed in the last two decades. The results revealed that some long held Australian stereotype traits have remained stable. However, the popularity of other traits was found to have dropped since the mid 1990s and since the last Katz-Braly checklist survey which was conducted in 2006. A trend for decreasing uniformity in Australian self-stereotype consensus, which was observed by Haslam et al. (1999), seems to have abated with results demonstrating a return to the rate of the mid 1990s.
The third article, presented as Chapter 4, reports the results of three studies, which further explored the subtle influences of culture and race on impression formation, as well as the influence of individual differences in attitudes towards race. The first study surveyed 205 Australians and the results demonstrated participants could detect Australian nationals from foreign national individuals by briefly observing their enculturated nonverbal accent – with no social interaction. The second study surveyed 212 Australian participants to explore the effect that individual differences in attitude towards race (lay theories of race) have on the ability to perceive subtle enculturation cues via nonverbal accent. All targets were of Asian racial appearance, with half being Australian nationals while the other half were foreign nationals. Results did not show any significant differences between the lay theories of racial essentialism and social constructionism.
The third study in this chapter reports survey results from Australian participants (N = 208) which explored the part stereotypes play in how impressions are formed by national majority group members about racial minority groups. Participants attributed Australian stereotypes to their fellow cultural ingroup members (i.e., fellow Australians) without knowing they were observing two groups of targets (i.e., fellow ingroup nationals and foreign outgroup). This study also investigated the effect for individual differences in lay theory of race. The target individuals all presented a minority Asian racial appearance, and results showed that while there was not any difference between the two lay theories in how participants attributed stereotypes, there was a significant three-way interaction effect. This revealed a weaker effect for participants who endorsed racial essentialism, demonstrating that while nonverbal accent affected how both groups allocated Australian stereotypes in the same way, it had a weaker effect for participants who endorsed racial essentialism.
The research findings presented throughout this thesis offer insight into the perception of race and enculturation when national majority members form first impressions of racial minority groups , specifically by teasing apart the potential difference between a person’s racial appearance and their actual ethnic enculturation. While previous research has examined how we stereotype others according to their “ethnicity”, often it has coupled racial appearance with ethnic enculturation, without separating the influence on attitudes of the two cues. The findings from the current research have implications for how we structure and behave in multicultural and immigrant based societies, understanding that while many cultures may exist and thrive in multicultural nations, racial appearance is not a criterion for the inclusion or exclusion of others to the mainstream cultural society. As majority group members come to understand and become aware of the subtle cues of cultural belonging, it will lead to more effective strategies in the promotion of inclusion and positive perceptions of minority group members who call immigrant nations home.
Right-Wing Protective Popular Nationalism and the Desire to Protect the Australian Way of Life
Over the past decade, a surge of right-wing populism has occurred across the globe. High populist votes have been found in regions experiencing economic challenges (especially following the financial crisis of 2007-2008), high unemployment rates, and rising immigrant populations. Examples are the Brexit vote of 2020 in the United Kingdom and the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, where populist rhetoric centered on immigration and multiculturalism and was used by conservative populist leaders in a bid to appeal to the people. The popular nationalism literature has argued that such rhetoric contributes to a climate of fear, where the ingroup perceives the "other" (the outgroup) as threatening, which in turn creates symbolic boundaries of national inclusion and exclusion.
The current research explored an analysis of popular nationalism in Australia, which proposed that symbolic boundaries of national inclusion and exclusion are based on perceptions of cultural threat to the nation and the national way of life. From this, we introduced the concept of right-wing protective popular nationalism (RWPPN), which concerns the desire to protect the dominant culture and way of life from outside cultural differences. This construct is based on a four-point interdisciplinary framework in which RWPPN is theoretically derived from political science and sociology, conceptually related to social psychology constructs, and contextually related to contemporary political and societal phenomena. RWPPN is theorised to originate in and be strengthened by right-wing populist rhetoric and is measured as an individual differences variable reflecting the individual's desire to protect a particular way of life.
We conducted four studies that were reported in two journal articles and a book chapter. Studies 1 and 2 operationalised RWPPN as a social psychological construct and generated a new psychometric tool, the RWPPN Scale, which measures this novel construct. These two studies found preliminary evidence of RWPPN in a general sample of the Australian population and provided validation for the RWPPN Scale. As hypothesised, RWPPN related to established social psychological constructs, including symbolic threat, social dominance orientation (SDO), and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). The results found support for RWPPN as a unique construct. RWPPN was also related to national identity, opposition to multiculturalism, prejudice, and negativity towards ethnic minorities living in Australia (emotional responses of fear, anger, and aggressive tendencies). In Study 2, the effects of RWPPN on aggressive tendencies held when controlling for SDO and RWA. RWPPN also mediated the relationship between RWA and aggressive tendencies.
Study 3 offered theoretical advances regarding the connections between RWPPN and conservative populism in Australia. Using audience segmentation, this study demonstrated that a population could be segmented into groups that varied in their level of RWPPN and a range of psychological profiling variables that relate to right-wing populism. The results suggested that RWPPN is associated with notions of national identity, negative consequences for ethnic minorities living in Australia, and a preference for monoculturalism. Given the multicultural nature of Australian society, these findings suggested that prevalent high RWPPN would have negative consequences for social cohesion.
Study 4 extended the findings of the previous studies regarding the relationship between RWPPN and aggressive tendencies towards ethnic minorities living in Australia by exploring the moderating effects of RWPPN on aggressive tendencies. A series of multiple regression analyses found that RWPPN predicted aggressive tendencies towards ethnic minority groups living in Australia. Furthermore, RWPPN moderated the effects of nationally related variables (collective narcissism, identity fusion, and threat perceptions) on these aggressive tendencies.
This research program provides preliminary evidence for RWPPN as a novel social psychological construct in contemporary Australian society. The results indicate that high RWPPN sentiment is associated with an exclusive sense of national belonging and opposition to multiculturism and predicts negative outcomes for ethnic minority groups living in Australia, including aggressive tendencies towards them. Future research is required to test the causal connections between RWPPN sentiment and political populist rhetoric and ascertain if RWPPN sentiment is present outside Australia. These future directions are important and necessary as the current research suggests that RWPPN can shed light on the implications and consequences for intergroup dynamics of desiring to protect the national culture and way of life.
Prejudice against asylum seekers and the fear of terrorism: The importance of context
Australia has a rich history of immigration. Historically, immigrants have often met with negativity and distrust (for example, Greek, Italian and Vietnamese immigrants). Evidence is now accumulating that many Australians also are critical of the latest 'wave' of asylum seekers. In the present study, we were interested in the effect of the wider society on the social inclusion (or not) of asylum seekers using an ecological framework and in particular focusing on the 'macrosystem' and 'location'. To do this, we examined negative attitudes toward asylum seekers as well as their correlates collected from 649 members of the West Australian community. Our results indicate that participants who reported more negative views about asylum seekers were also significantly more .likely to report a fear of terrorism. Additionally, there were significant location differences in the strength of this relationship. Together with past research, our results indicate that context can greatly impact on the well-being of new Australians.
Functions of attitudes towards ethnic groups: Effects of level of abstraction
A direct measure of attitude function was used to examine symbolic and instrumental elements of racial attitudes as a function of level of abstraction. Two studies were conducted in different countries, in which participants explained their thoughts and feelings concerning a specific (e.g., "Indians" or "Chinese") or abstract (e.g., "Ethnic Minorities") attitude object, and then rated the importance of each thought or feeling. A coding scheme was used to record the attitude function represented by each thought or feeling. In both studies, symbolic functions were more present for the abstract target than the specific targets. These differences have important implications for interventions and theories that address prejudice. They also provide evidence that functions of attitudes towards broader social groups cannot be regarded as the central tendency of functions toward subgroups, which is an important potential caveat to theories of social categorization.
Research Update - Monitoring community attitudes toward refugee settlement in Armidale, NSW, 2018-2020
In 2017, Armidale NSW became a new refugee resettlement location under the Humanitarian Settlement Program. Around 650 Ezidis settled in Armidale from March 2018 to March 2020, when new arrivals were paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Armidale refugee resettlement program offers an opportunity to study a regional community’s response to refugee resettlement in Australia. While there have been many studies of refugees’ resettlement in Australia’s major centres and regional communities, very few studies have closely examined the receiving community’s response. However, the success of refugee resettlement goes both ways. It requires mutual positive relations between refugees and the receiving community, and the receiving community’s responses to the newcomers form an important contextual element of refugee resettlement. The well-being of both is entwined as refugees become part of the fabric of the receiving community.
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