Does prevalence-induced concept change affect our perceptions of ethnic origin?

Abstract Background: Prevalence-induced concept change (PICC) refers to the observation that as the number of instances of a concept changes, so too do the boundaries of that concept. In the current study, we propose that PICC might affect how we perceive people from different geographic or ethnic origins. Specifically, we suggest that as the prevalence of faces of Central-European geographic origin decreases in the perceived environment, the concept of “Central-European” expands such as to include faces that would otherwise be judged as Middle-Eastern in origin. Rigidity in such concept spaces may increase the social distance between immigrants and the existing population and may thereby support right-wing populistic mindsets and threaten the cohesion of societies. Method: To test whether this is the case, we propose a pre-registered online study that leverages a modified computerised task to assess how prevalence-induced concept change affects judgements about others’ geographic origin and participants’ own concepts of their geographic origin and facial appearance. Expected results: As the prevalence of Central-European faces in the environment decreases over time (trials), the participants will be more likely to judge faces they previously thought of as Middle-Eastern now as Central-European. Results from this study might provide insight into one cognitive mechanism that may help explain how newcomers of Middle-Eastern geographic origin to predominantly Central-European countries assimilate into and become accepted into their new communities. Background Since the beginning of the civil war in Syria in 2014, about 790,000 people from this area immigrated to Germany (Graf, 2018). This is a substantial objective increase in the prevalence of Syrian people in Germany. However, given the media coverage and the corresponding controversies around immigration, the subjective perception of the prevalence of immigrants from Syria may be even stronger. This influx of Syrian people in Germany has shaped the political landscape of German society, and populistic and radical right-wing mindsets seem to be on the rise (Zick et al., 2019). Although several descriptive studies have looked at the societal and economic consequences of the refugee crisis (e.g., Abraham, 2017; Holmes & Castañeda, 2016), the cognitive mechanisms that may underlie these changes in political mindsets and attitudes remain unclear. It is argued that contact among refugee immigrants aids in developing favorable attitudes toward such populations, whereas respondents’ own experiences with violence and persecution were not correlated with favorable attitudes toward refugees (Ghosn et al., 2019). This also holds true for citizens of refugee welcoming countries who hold conservative beliefs: positive personal contact with refugees reduces negative stereotypes about them (Knappert et al., 2021). In this cross-cultural research project, we propose an experimental approach to study whether changes in the perceived prevalence of immigrants may lead to shifts in attitudes towards immigrants and immigration. Furthermore, we ask whether this effect may depend on the base rate of immigrants in a given society and whether it is modulated by demographic variables such as age, political affiliation, and socio-economic status (SES). To investigate this question, we propose a cross-cultural experimental approach to study two samples of individuals in Germany and Canada. The reasoning behind the cross-cultural comparison is to study individuals in a society that has a stable migration rate and long history of immigration (e.g., Canada) as opposed to a country that has experienced a recent rise in immigration rates (e.g., Germany). Based on previous work (Devine et al., under review; Devine et al., sub.; Levari et al., 2018), we hypothesize that an increased prevalence of immigrants in a society leads to shifts in concept boundaries about who is judged to be an immigrant. These changes in concept spaces may have substantial implications because they may increase the social distance between immigrants and the existing population and may thereby support right-wing populistic mindsets and threaten the cohesion of societies (von Hermanni et al., 2018; Vorländer et al., 2018; Zick et al., 2019). Prevalence-induced concept change describes the empirical observation that as the numbers of instances of a given concept change in the environment, so do the boundaries for that concept, such that they come to include instances that they would otherwise exclude (Levari et al., 2018). For example, one task that measures prevalence-induced concept change on a basic perceptual level requires participants to serially judge whether individual dots that vary on a spectrum between blue and purple are in fact blue or purple. When the relative frequency of objectively coloured dots in the environment is consistent across the task (50% blue dots, 50% purple dots), peoples’ judgements are relatively stable: blue dots are judged as blue and purple dots as purple. However, if the number of blue dots changes, dots initially judged as purple are categorised as blue after the prevalence change. These changes do not only occur at the perceptual level, but they also arise in higher-order social and ethical judgments, like judgements of threatening faces, judgements about the ethicality of research proposals or about body images (Levari et al., 2018, see Study 6 and 7; Devine et al., 2021.). In the context of the current study, we hypothesize that changes in the perceived prevalence of immigrants in a society leads to shifts in concept boundaries about who is judged to be an immigrant. To study this question, we propose an experimental approach in which subjects are presented with faces of Central-European or Middle-Eastern geographic background and are asked to judge their origin. To assess prevalence-induced concept change, half of the participants perceive the faces in a stationary environment (80% Central-European, 20% Middle-Eastern) whereas the other half perceive the faces in a changing environment in which the proportion of Central-European faces decreases in relation to the proportion of Middle-Eastern faces. We predict that as the proportion of Central-European faces decreases, the concept of what is considered to be a Central-European face expands. That is, subjects will now judge more faces that they previously categorized as Middle-Eastern in geographic background to be Central-European. At first glance, such an increase in concept boundaries may be considered desirable in terms of a societal inclusion of immigrants (Allport, 1954). However, we think that it is more likely that these concept changes will lead to a greater ingroup-outgroup distance between social groups because the representations of who is considered to be an immigrant or not are getting more distinct from each other. To study whether the degree of prevalence-induced concept change may depend on the base rate of immigrants in a society, we will adopt a cross-cultural comparison between Canada (21.9% of the population in the 2016 census reported being a current or had been a landed immigrant; StatCan, 2017) and Germany (17% of the population in 2019 were reported to be first-generation immigrants; Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2019).

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