Scholars from across the social and media sciences have issued a clarion call to address a recent resurgence in criminalized characterizations of immigrants. Do these characterizations meaningfully impact individuals' beliefs about immigrants and immigration? Across two online convenience samples (total N = 1,054 adult U.S. residents), we applied a novel analytic technique to test how different narratives-achievement, criminal, and struggle-oriented-impacted cognitive representations of German, Russian, Syrian, and Mexican immigrants and the concept of immigrants in general. All stories featured male targets. Achievement stories homogenized individual immigrant representations, whereas both criminal and struggle-oriented stories racialized them along a White/non-White axis: Germany clustered with Russia, and Syria clustered with Mexico. However, criminal stories were unique in making our most egalitarian participants' representations as differentiated as our least egalitarian participants'. Narratives about individual immigrants also generalized to update representations of nationality groups. Most important, narrative-induced representations correlated with immigration-policy preferences: Achievement narratives and corresponding homogenized representations promoted preferences for less restriction, and criminal narratives promoted preferences for more.

中文翻译：

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叙事塑造移民的认知表征和移民政策偏好

来自社会科学和媒体科学的学者们发出了号角，以解决最近对移民定罪定性的重新抬头的问题。这些特征是否对个人对移民和移民的信念产生了有意义的影响？在两个在线便利样本（总共 N = 1,054 名美国成年居民）中，我们应用了一种新颖的分析技术来测试德国、俄罗斯、叙利亚和墨西哥移民的不同叙事——成就、犯罪和斗争导向——如何影响认知表征，以及移民的一般概念。所有故事都以男性为目标。成就故事使个人移民代表同质化，而犯罪和斗争导向的故事则使他们沿着白人/非白人轴心种族化：德国与俄罗斯聚集在一起，叙利亚与墨西哥聚集在一起。然而，犯罪故事的独特之处在于使我们最平等的参与者的陈述与我们最不平等的参与者的表现不同。关于个别移民的叙述也概括为更新国籍群体的表述。最重要的是，叙事诱导的表征与移民政策偏好相关：成就叙事和相应的同质化表征促进了对较少限制的偏好，而犯罪叙事则促进了对更多限制的偏好。