Existing studies demonstrate that threat perceptions matter for immigration attitudes. However, while these perceptions are potentially sensitive to information about immigrants’ impacts, questions remain about whether inserting such information into public debates changes attitudes and policy preferences—especially on polarizing issues like immigration. Moreover, few studies have considered messages featuring the type of nonphotorealistic visual elements that increasingly appear in media. Using a survey experiment fielded in the United Kingdom, we examined whether evidence about European Union immigrants’ modestly positive economic impacts on the United Kingdom—presented either as text, with visualizations, or as an animated film—changed immigration attitudes and policy preferences. Although visual elements did not have an effect over and above text, all the informational treatments moved attitudes and preferences in positive directions, even among Leave voters. Our study brings together research on immigration public opinion and visual media and has implications for policymaking and journalism practice.

Immigration continues to animate contemporary political and policy debates across receiving societies (McLaren 2015). Within this context, understanding public attitudes on immigration remains crucial: not only are there arguments that governments’ responses should be based, in part, on readings of citizens’ preferences (Ruhs 2022), but there is also evidence that what people think about immigrants and asylum-seekers matters for subsequent behaviors including their willingness to provide assistance to these groups and support their longer term residency (e.g., Thravalou et al. 2021).

Immigration public opinion studies regularly observe that attitudes and preferences vary depending on migrants’ characteristics (Bansak et al. 2016; Hainmueller and Hopkins 2015). These include features such as ethnicity (Ford 2011), religious identity (Fernández-Reino et al. 2022), skill level (Naumann et al. 2018), and—in a world that continues to be affected by COVID-19 (Xiang et al. 2022)—essentialness to national economies and frontline services (Fernández-Reino et al. 2020; Gerver 2022). Generally, what motivates these variations is the extent to which host societies perceive these groups to pose threats to material welfare or symbolic identities (Dinesen and Hjorth 2020; Dražanová 2022). Although the salience and strength of these perceptions are likely influenced by predisposing factors set earlier in life, such as personality traits (Gallego and Pardos-Prado 2014), they are also potentially sensitive to available information about each threat. Indeed, longer-standing theories of attitude formation suggest that people base their opinions on prior conceptions and understandings comprising knowledge gained from a range of sources including media (Blinder and Jeannet 2018; Lippmann 1922; Zaller 1992).1

Whether directly or indirectly invoking those theories, an established line of scholarship has empirically tested to what extent information shapes political behavior. It suggests that the extent to which voters possess relevant information matters for their attitudes and, to a lesser degree, policy preferences (Althaus 2003; Bartels 1996; De Vries et al. 2018; Gaines et al. 2007). But given growing affective polarization and partisan motivated reasoning, recent empirical work has revisited these findings to further develop scope conditions under which and for whom this happens—especially when the information runs against respondents’ prior beliefs (Leeper and Mullinix 2018).

Understanding these conditions particularly matters now: mis- and disinformation potentially contribute to greater polarization, cynicism, and inauthenticity (McKay and Tenove 2021) while presenting challenges for legislators trying to read and respond to public opinion (Ahlstrom-Vij 2022). Recent studies involving multiple issues (Guess and Coppock 2020; Wood and Porter 2019), countries beyond the United States and Europe (Porter and Wood 2021), and a meta-analysis of 30 experimental studies (Walter et al. 2020) suggest that corrections reduce false beliefs. Several factors moderate this conclusion: elite cues indicating consensus or polarization (Druckman et al. 2013); whether individuals require a definitive answer to a problem (Kruglanski and Webster 1996); and partisanship in more right-leaning directions (Walter et al. 2020).

However, beyond generating more accurate beliefs, it is less clear whether and for whom information moves attitudes and preferences in particular directions. Here, the issue of immigration provides a potentially difficult and as such especially worthwhile test owing to its saliency and polarizing effects in receiving countries, which raises the likelihood of people interpreting political messages along partisan lines (Iyengar et al. 2019). This is certainly the case in the United Kingdom—the focus of this paper—where the debate about how to best manage immigration was a key issue in the 2016 European Union referendum (Hobolt 2016). Since the referendum, divisions among Leave and Remain voters have colored views on seemingly nonpolitical issues, potentially contributing to further affective polarization and new political identities (Hobolt et al. 2021).

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01979183221142779