Do self-interests lead to prejudice against minorities? A study by Dr. Lasse Stötzer and Prof. Dr. Florian Zimmermann from IZA and the University of Bonn points to this connection. A survey experiment showed that people express negative views about migrants in order to justify selfish behaviour. The results have been published in the journal ‘Games and Economic Behaviour’.
The researchers conducted a survey experiment with a representative sample of 1,200 German adults. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two test groups. One group had the opportunity to benefit personally. From a 50-euro donation to an immigration-friendly organisation, the participants were able to take a portion for themselves. They were then asked to estimate what percentage of refugees believe that women should not have equal rights in a democracy. The control group, on the other hand, could only redistribute the donation between two pro-immigration organisations without making any financial gain themselves.
‘The results were astonishing,’ says Prof. Dr. Florian Zimmermann from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, the Institute for Applied Microeconomics and the ECONtribute Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bonn. ‘Those who could benefit financially from taking money away from refugees were more likely to express negative views about them.’ This group was more likely to believe that refugees held regressive views about the role of women than the control group. This suggests that self-interest can lead people to justify their selfish behaviour by devaluing minorities – in this case, refugees, according to the researchers.
The study also found that this effect was much more pronounced among participants with lower incomes. People with a below-average household income were more likely to hold negative views about refugees when they had the opportunity to benefit at their expense. In contrast, participants with higher incomes showed no statistically recognisable changes in their beliefs under the various conditions.
The IZA press release can be found here.