Public discourse on immigration has seemed to polarize over recent years—with some people strongly trusting, but others strongly distrusting immigrants. We examined whether a cognitive strategy could mitigate these biased outgroup judgments. Given that subtractive counterfactual thoughts (“If only I had not done X. . .”) facilitate cognitive flexibility and especially a relational processing style, we hypothesized that these thoughts (vs. additive counterfactuals “If only I had done X. . .” and no counterfactuals) would weaken the relationship between people’s political orientation and the perceived trustworthiness of immigrants. In five experiments (two preregistered; total N = 1,189), we found that inducing subtractive (but not additive) counterfactuals—either via rhetorical questions in a political speech or via mindset priming—had the predicted debiasing effect. Taken together, subtle means such as using subtractive counterfactual questions in political communication seem to be a promising way to reduce biased outgroup judgments in heated public debates.

近年来，关于移民的公共话语似乎出现了两极分化——一些人强烈信任移民，而另一些人则强烈不信任移民。我们检查了认知策略是否可以减轻这些有偏见的外群体判断。鉴于减法反事实想法（“如果我没有做过 X ......”）促进认知灵活性，尤其是关系处理风格，我们假设这些想法（与加法反事实相比，“如果我做过 X ......”并且没有反事实）会削弱人们的政治倾向与移民的可信赖度之间的关系。在五个实验中（两个预先注册；总共N= 1,189），我们发现通过政治演讲中的修辞问题或通过心态启动来诱导减法（但不是加法）反事实具有预测的去偏效应。总而言之，在政治沟通中使用减法反事实问题等微妙的方法似乎是减少激烈的公共辩论中偏颇的外群体判断的一种有希望的方法。