How does exposure to information on ethnic discrimination inspire belief change? A preregistered population-based survey experiment testing resonance and dissonance mechanisms
Political Psychology (with Willem de Koster, Jeroen van der Waal, Masja van Meeteren)
Informed by the information-deficit model, this preregistered survey experiment based on a random sampling of the Dutch population register (n = 2792) assesses how exposure to information about ethnic discrimination inspires adult belief change, especially how it affects (a) perceptions of ethnic inequality, (b) meritocratic explanations of ethnic inequality, and (c) attitudes toward affirmative action. Moreover, we assess two mechanisms through which belief change following exposure to informational stimuli can come about: because information dissonates or resonates with vicarious experiences. That is, does belief change happen when the information provided produces a shock or when it resonates with vicariously experienced ethnic inequality and discrimination? We test these mechanisms by interacting the effect of information provision with participants' everyday interactions with people with a migration background. While our preregistered hypotheses are not corroborated, our results tentatively suggest that the information provided affects perceptions of ethnic inequality according to the resonance mechanism. Contrastingly, it affects meritocratic explanations of ethnic inequality and support for affirmative action in line with the dissonance mechanism. These findings hold for the simultaneous modeling of alternative explanations centering on the role of ideology, social identity, and ethnic threat in processing information. We discuss the implications for research, policy, and practice.
click for PDF | doi: 10.1111/pops.70059 (open access) | replication materials | preregistration