Pro-immigration content on social media and its effect on behavior and attitudes about immigration

The number of immigrants has been rapidly increasing in the last decades. Natives do not generally welcome them in the new country and have wrong perceptions about them, which challenges their assimilation. It is not clear which is the best way to modify these beliefs and how it affects people’s behavior. On top of this, social media has become an integral part of modern life and even a channel for everyday political deliberation and for social and political movements. To what extent social media directly affects individuals’ social preferences, attitudes, and behavior is an open empirical question, especially when discussing immigration. To answer these questions, I will conduct an experiment on Facebook in Colombia, a country that has recently received a large influx of immigrants, and study if exposure to pro-immigration social media posts improves natives’ perceptions, attitudes, and altruistic behavior. I hypothesize that an increase in the pro-immigrant posts people see will increase exposure and salience of immigration topics, which will lead to changes in their perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors through changes in empathy and perspective-taking, which will depend on their initial beliefs. Since the number of immigrants has been increasing in the last decades and a body of research suggests that people have misperceptions about them, finding effective and far-reaching mediums to correct these misperceptions could be an important policy tool for overcoming anti-immigration sentiments.