Folk theories of nationality and anti-immigrant attitudes

Nationality governs almost every aspect of our lives, including where we may live and travel, as well as our opportunities for education, healthcare and work. It is a common-sense social category that guides us in making inferences about the social world1–4. Nationalism has been extensively studied within the social5–16 and cognitive sciences17–25, but there has been little empirical investigation into folk theories regarding what determines someone’s nationality. In experiments carried out in the United States and India (N = 2,745), we used a variant of the switched-at-birth task26–31 to investigate the extent to which people believe that nationality is determined by biology or is a malleable social identity that can be acquired32–34. We find that folk theories of nationality seem remarkably flexible. Depending on the framing of the question, people report believing that nationality is either fluid or fixed at birth. Our results demonstrate that people from different cultures with different experiences of migration and different explicit stereotypes of their own nation may share similar folk theories about nationality. Moreover, these theories may shape attitudes towards immigrants—an important public-policy issue35–37. Belief that nationality is malleable is associated with more positive attitudes towards immigrants even when holding ideology constant.