How Urban Population Change Elicits Prejudice Toward Migrant Workers in China: The Mediating Roles of Status and Entitativity 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 from 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. Two experiments (N_total = 716) conducted in Shanghai partially supported the hypotheses. Results showed that Shanghai residents reminded of the urban population changes (vs. irrelevant information) reported higher status and entitativity threats to their urban identity, which in turn predicted increased prejudice toward migrant workers and non-locals. This work sheds new light on how urban demographic change fosters prejudice against internal migrants in China, and has important implications for developing policies to mitigate such prejudice and enhance the intergroup relations between urban residents and migrants.