An EU Paradoxical Thinking Intervention to Affect Non-EU Immigration Attitudes

Abstract

Due to exacerbated war conflicts and poor living conditions in developing countries, the European Union has seen a growing number of incoming immigrants, which have increased opposition towards non-EU immigration. While traditional persuasion techniques may not be particularly effective in changing these intergroup attitudes as they may generate resistance, self-persuasion methodologies are better suited to reduce this resistance. This research tested the hypothesis that anti-immigrant attitudes can be reduced by exposing participants to a paradoxical thinking intervention, a newly developed self-persuasion technique which refers to an amplified and exaggerated anti-immigrant message. A total of 286 participants were exposed to open-ended questions and divided into two condition groups: a control condition where the questions showed support towards non-EU immigration and a paradoxical thinking condition where the questions were leading in an anti-immigrant direction. Their attitude towards immigrants were measured before, immediately after and a week after the first exposure to the intervention. Results did not show the paradoxical thinking interventions to be more effective compared to traditional methodologies. Despite these results undermine the recent, positive findings on paradoxical thinking, no strong conclusion can be drawn from this study given the low percentage of individuals who were strongly against immigration in our sample. Future research needs to obtain a more representative sample to corroborate previous results shown by paradoxical thinking manipulations. This is highly relevant as support towards immigration could have beneficial effects on the economic, cultural, and societal development of the European Union.