ESRC Society Today

The purpose of this research is to draw conclusions about the effects of the media on current public thoughts and behaviours regarding asylum seekers and immigrants entering the UK. The research will attempt to draw immediate and concrete links between reading materials depicting asylum seekers negatively and ensuing negative thoughts and judgments about and toward individual asylum seekers. Alternatively, it will also attempt to show whether reading positive materials, ie presenting positive aspects of asylum seeker stereotypes, will influence positive thoughts and behavioural judgements toward asylum seekers. The role of an individual's low prejudiced personal beliefs will also be examined throughout, to highlight instances when beliefs and behaviours may not be affected by negative media. Finally, this research attempts examine whether these types of media influence assessments about others only, or whether they also influence one's own behaviour, as in the traditional 'behavioural priming' research of Dijksterhuis (eg Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998), where bringing a stereotype to mind increases the likelihood of behaviours in-line with that stereotype. The relationship between these factors will be examined and the research will bring awareness to the ways in which stereotypes may unconsciously affect our behaviour (and may be controlled by low prejudiced beliefs).

Award/Grant Outputs and Documents
Click on to download the document.	Number of Documents: 3

• Back to top