In recent decades, high levels of immigration into advanced democracies have been met with increasing prejudice and discrimination by native-born populations. Macro- and micro-aggressions punctuate immigrants’ lived experiences, from enduring suspicious stares and fearing that they might escalate to violence, to fielding questions about where we’re really from and (relevant to this study) not being extended a helping hand in public spaces.

Host governments assume that the problem is the cultural and social distance between immigrants and natives. Thus, their solution is to implement coercive assimilation policies and programs like banning religious head coverings in France or mandating language classes for immigrant children in Denmark. However, in their new book, Native Bias: Overcoming Discrimination against Immigrants, Donghyun Danny Choi, Mathias Poertner, and Nicholas Sambanis challenge this assumption: perhaps the root of the problem does not lie in ascriptive and cultural differences, and perhaps the two groups are more similar than they think. The authors use an innovative set of surveys and field experiments in Germany to pin down what precisely generates natives’ bias against immigrants. If we know what drives it, we’re in a much better position to fix it.

When social scientists have sought to explain anti-immigrant bias, they have tended to focus on one of two possible causes: the perceived economic threat that migrants might pose to the native-born or the cultural threat driven by differences in race, ethnicity, or religion. In this book, the authors draw on social identity theory and intergroup conflict research to theorize an alternative possibility: that the native-born perceive migrants as a threat to long-standing civic norms. These norms include, for example, not littering in public spaces, paying taxes, and contributing to the community. The authors argue that anti-immigrant bias is driven by fears— often unjustified—that newcomers do not share the norms about the meaning and practice of citizenship. So, when natives observe ascriptive differences in immigrants, they are also imprinting beliefs of differences in values and norms that, the authors point out, may not exist.

The key, therefore, to reducing discrimination and hostility toward minorities is to bridge this (mis)perceived gap between the norms, ideas, and values held among natives versus immigrants. In opposition to existing explanations of anti-immigrant bias, this book’s argument implies that we should divert attention from focusing on ascriptive characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, or religion, and the prescriptions that go along with that focus, which tend to result in coercive assimilationist interventions that are designed to minimize differences between native and immigrants.

The authors tested their theory in Germany shortly after the arrival of a million Syrian refugees and, along with that arrival, a rise in the far-right anti-immigrant political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Empirically, most of the literature relies on public opinion surveys asking natives explicitly about anti-immigration attitudes. The authors also use public opinion surveys (implicit association tests and conjoint experiments) to pinpoint which immigrant attributes are less acceptable (not knowing German, being Muslim, wearing a hijab) and to identify mechanisms. But the main empirical innovation is their creative use of embedded field experiments to uncover real-world discriminatory behaviors (the manifestations of anti-immigrant attitudes), thereby spotlighting the lived experiences of immigrants.

The main setup of these experiments is a seemingly ordinary social situation: a woman at a train station drops a bag of fruit—except, we learn that this woman is an actor, and there is not just one woman but instead multiple versions of this woman. Sometimes the woman is a white German native; other times, she is visibly from a minoritized immigrant background. Sometimes that same immigrant actor is wearing a hijab and is speaking on the phone in either German, Turkish, or Arabic. And it was not just one train station but more than 50 train stations. In total, this clever choreography with multiple treatment iterations occurred almost 3,000 times in front of 8,600 bystanders. The main outcome is centered on this question: Do any bystanders choose to help?

By measuring differences in assistance rates, the authors quantified levels of everyday discrimination. First, both the German native and non-veiled immigrant women were assisted at similar rates—around 76% of the time—but the veiled immigrant woman was assisted only 67% of the time. The magnitude of this gap is larger in East Germany, precisely where the AfD has been gaining support. Interestingly, the results do not change even if the veiled immigrant woman is speaking German, rather than Turkish or Arabic, suggesting that linguistic assimilation might not be the answer to reducing bias. What does make a difference is whether she sanctions another actor, a German man, who drops an empty coffee cup on the platform. In demonstrating that she shares the norm against public littering, her actions correct a commonly held misperception among native Germans that immigrants are more likely to litter. Another fascinating finding is that native German women tend to be more accepting of immigrant women who signal that they hold progressive gender norms.

Returning to the main research questions—Do natives’ misperceptions around norm divergence drive anti-immigrant bias and can those misperceptions be corrected, without requiring immigrants to cast off their own cultural identity?—this book’s findings confidently answer yes to both. However, if we return to the initial motivation of the book, which focuses on policies, programs, and interventions to reduce native bias and promote more inclusive behaviors, the picture becomes less clear. The treatments in the experiments involve immigrants demonstrably signaling their adherence to German norms: those are individual behaviors, not policies.

Although the authors caution against this interpretation of their results, it should be emphasized that the onus of reducing discrimination should not be on immigrants to more conspicuously signal their norm adherence in public spaces. In the book’s conclusion, the authors discuss implications for policy design. They advocate for programs that target natives’ misperceptions and stereotypes, as opposed to assimilationist policies targeting immigrants. But even if natives’ observations of immigrant norm adherence lessen bias, it is unclear how an intervention could be scaled up to a societal level. Results from the authors’ survey, in which German natives watched videos of the choreographed experiment, showed that the positive effects of the immigrant actor’s norm-enforcing actions did not generalize to immigrants as a whole. This suggests that similar interventions would need to overcome this exceptionalizing of a few “model immigrants.”

Considering the policy implications of this book’s important findings leads to additional avenues for future research. There is a rich and growing research community studying prejudice-reduction interventions that use intergroup contact, perspective-giving, and perspective-taking. These studies can also incorporate shared civic norms and cross-cutting identities. Beyond experimentally testing programmatic interventions, scholars could build on this book’s theory by studying existing institutions and policies that might already create opportunities for demonstrating and observing civic norm promotion, such as places where immigrants vote and join school boards. In doing so, we could better understand the promise and limits of emphasizing shared values and norms as a way to change prejudicial attitudes and behaviors in the long term.

Scholars who study immigration, multiculturalism, prejudice-reduction and social identity, as well as those who are interested in the use of creative experimental methods in the social sciences, will find inspiration and optimism in this groundbreaking new book.