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Attitudes toward Immigrants, Beliefs about Causes of Poverty and Effects of Perspective-Taking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2018

Daniel Buraschi ,
Antonio Bustillos  and
Carmen Huici
Daniel Buraschi*
Affiliation:
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Spain)
Antonio Bustillos
Affiliation:
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Spain)
Carmen Huici
Affiliation:
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Spain)
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Daniel Buraschi. Departamento de Psicología Social y de las Organizaciones de la Facultad de Psicología de la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia. Juan del Rosal, 10, 28040 Madrid (Spain). E-mail: buraschidaniel@hotmail.com
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Abstract

The present work presents three studies that investigate the relationship between causal attributions of poverty in Africa, attitudes towards African immigrants and perspective-taking. The objective of preliminary study (N = 54) was to collect information to adapt the Perceived Causes of Third World Poverty Scale (Hine & Montiel, 1999), in the Spanish adaptation by Betancor et al. (2002) to Spanish adolescents. The Study 1 (N = 102) explores the factorial structure of the teenager questionnaire adaptation and to test the relationship with Modern Racism Scale (McConahay, 1986). Correlational analysis reflects the existence of a central element in the new forms of racism: Victim blaming through Personal Attributions of Poverty. The objective of Study 2 (N = 62) was to determine whether empathic induction through empathic perspective-taking (Batson et al., 1997) can ameliorate the individual’s attributions of poverty concerning African immigrants among majority group members. However, the opposite effect was found, empathy induction increased Personal Attributions of poverty (η2 = .10). This effect was moderated by Modern Racism, simple slope test indicates t(52) = 2.49, p < .01, higher prejudiced participants increased Personal Attribution of poverty after empathic induction, blaming the victims for their situation.

Keywords

empathymodern racismperspective-takingpoverty attributions
Type
Research Article
Information
The Spanish Journal of Psychology , Volume 21 , 2018 , E66
Copyright
Copyright © Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Colegio Oficial de Psicólogos de Madrid 2018 

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Footnotes

How to cite this article:

Buraschi, D., Bustillos, A., & Huici, C.. (2018). Attitudes toward immigrants, beliefs about causes of poverty and effects of perspective-taking. The Spanish Journal of Psychology, 21. e66. Doi:10.1017/sjp.2018.65

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