Blaming “illegal aliens” for crisis?: Cultural worldview defenses in effects of death and economic threats on anti-undocumented immigrant attitudes

Abstract

A stark trend since the COVID-19 pandemic is that many people have expressed more hostility toward outgroups, including undocumented immigrants. Aiming to understand the root causes of this tendency, we brought together two traditions in the threat literature: (1) research on terror management theory that emphasizes outgroup antagonism as a downstream effect of mortality salience and (2) the line of studies based on group threat theory that highlights the influence of general economic conditions on intergroup relations. We explored whether the explanatory mechanism of cultural worldview defenses, posited by terror management theory, could similarly account for economic influences on intergroup relations. Through an online experiment, we found that participants (American citizens, N = 297) exposed to a death or economic threat had higher levels of anti-undocumented immigrant attitudes than the control group (without a threat). An increased tendency toward individualistic value explained the effects of death and economic threats on the outcome variable. Analytic thinking, a culturally prescribed cognitive style, did not mediate the threat-to-attitude relationships, but both threats influenced it in different ways. Therefore, we concluded that the theoretical lens of the worldview defense system was related to economic threats.