How urban population change elicits prejudice toward migrant workers in China: The mediating roles of status, entitativity, and symbolic threats

Abstract

With the rapid urbanization in China, millions of people have moved from rural regions to cities as migrant workers, where many of them face various discrimination and ill treatment. Meanwhile, the increasing number of migrants in cities might render indigenous urban residents the future numerical minority. Drawing on social identity theory, uncertainty‐identity theory, and intergroup threat theory, I hypothesized that such urban population changes in China could elevate prejudice toward rural‐to‐urban migrant workers by eliciting status threat, entitativity threat, realistic threat, and symbolic threat to urban residents. Three experiments ( N _total  = 1327) conducted in Shanghai partially supported the hypotheses. Study 1 showed that Shanghai urban residents reminded of urban population changes (vs. irrelevant information) reported greater prejudice toward migrant workers. Studies 2 (registered analyses) and 3 (registered report) showed that urban population change had parallel indirect effects on increased prejudice toward migrant workers through status threat, entitativity threat, and symbolic threat. Study 3 additionally demonstrated that status threat and symbolic threat parallelly mediated the effects of urban population change on reduced support for policies benefiting migrant workers. This work sheds new light on how urban demographic change fosters prejudice toward internal migrants in China and has important implications for developing policies to mitigate such prejudice and enhance intergroup relations between urban residents and migrants.