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Research has shown that members of the national majority group generally consider host culture adoption by immigrants as desirable. However, so far, this positive effect of perceived host culture adoption on attitudes toward immigrants has not been explained. We argue that majority members infer national identification of immigrants from their cultural adoption. Moreover, we predict that this inference should decrease majority members’ feeling of ingroup threat, therefore also improving their attitudes toward immigrants. We conducted two experimental studies. In Study 1, majority members who were presented an immigrant group that adopted the host culture held more positive attitudes than those who were presented one that disregarded it. In line with our hypothesis, this effect was fully mediated by perceived identification of the immigrants with the host nation, itself decreasing perception of ingroup threat. Study 2 reproduced the same experimental design, but used descriptions of individual immigrants’ acculturation strategies, and the immigrant group’s status – valued vs. devalued origin – was also manipulated. In addition, Study 2 focused on dimensions of the “Big Two” of social perception. Results replicated the mediational effect of perceived identification on attribution of both warmth and competence traits. The status manipulation had no significant effect and did not interact with cultural adoption. These two studies provide robust evidence that perception of host nation identification explains the effects of perceived cultural adoption on attitudes towards immigrants.

Social representations of the historical past, anchored in historical experience and cultural values, play a motivational role for justifying collective behaviour. The First and Second World Wars (WWI and WWII) are the most remembered historical events around the world. The aim of the current study is to investigate, based on country-level data, the relationship between the country's role during the war, social development, cultural values and willingness to fight in a future war, and how social representations of WWII mediate these processes. The data from the World History Survey were collected from a total of 6628 university students from 36 countries. The results showed that ascribing WWII a progressive (UN creation, democracy) or technological-scientific explanation, but also perceiving WWII as a social catastrophe, prevailed more than beliefs justifying WWII (just and necessary war). Directly or indirectly victorious nations endorse legitimizing and positive representations of world wars more than defeated ones. The effects of hierarchical and collectivistic values and low social development on willingness to fight in a war are mediated by legitimizing social representations of WWII. Importantly, when controlled for socio-structural differences (human development index), the indirect effect of being a victorious nation in a war on willingness to fight through legitimizing representations of WWII was also significant. These findings suggest that social representations of WWII serve as anchors for determining the role of a nation in collective violence. Social representations legitimizing past collective violence seem to facilitate more positive attitudes towards potential future collective violence in victorious nations.

In the 1960s, a historical event occurred at one of Europe’s most prestigious universities: The Dutch- speaking students forced the French-speaking students to relocate and establish their own university. We compared the extent to which members of each social group developed elaborate memories of the events surrounding the conflict and whether they were associated with differences in rehearsal type (media, conversational, rumination) and initiating conditions (importance, political engagement, and negative/positive emotions). All participants were university students at the time of the conflict. We found that Dutch-speakers exhibited more elaborate memories compared to French-speakers and that importance was associated with elaborate memories only for the Dutch-speakers. However, positive emotions appear to be critical in the formation of elaborate memories across the social groups. We found no such associations for negative emotions. We discuss these results in terms of the social/cognitive pro- cesses transcending social group membership in understanding how individuals remember past conflicts., info:eu-repo/semantics/published