Roots of group threat: anti-prejudice motivations and implicit bias in perceptions of immigrants as threats

The perception of “group threat” is well known to predict opposition to immigration and negative attitudes toward ethnic minorities in Europe. However, the relationship between group threat and prejudice remains unclear, theoretically and empirically. We offer a new lens for viewing this relationship, using a dual process model of prejudice to help explain individual perceptions of threat as a function of both implicit prejudice and explicit motivation to control or avoid prejudice. Using original survey data from Britain and Germany, we employ measures of explicit motivation to control prejudice (MCP), and implicit intergroup attitudes (measured by the affect misattribution procedure) that are novel in this context. We find that perceived threat is independently associated with implicit attitudes and both internal and, in Britain, external MCP. We thereby connect group threat theory with an updated individual-level model of prejudice.