Flexible minds make more moderate views: Subtractive counterfactuals mitigate strong views about immigrants’ trustworthiness

Abstract

Public discourse on immigration has seemed to polarize over recent years—with some people strongly trusting, but others strongly distrusting immigrants. We examined whether a cognitive strategy could mitigate these biased outgroup judgments. Given that subtractive counterfactual thoughts (“If only I had not done X. . .”) facilitate cognitive flexibility and especially a relational processing style, we hypothesized that these thoughts (vs. additive counterfactuals “If only I had done X. . .” and no counterfactuals) would weaken the relationship between people’s political orientation and the perceived trustworthiness of immigrants. In five experiments (two preregistered; total N = 1,189), we found that inducing subtractive (but not additive) counterfactuals—either via rhetorical questions in a political speech or via mindset priming—had the predicted debiasing effect. Taken together, subtle means such as using subtractive counterfactual questions in political communication seem to be a promising way to reduce biased outgroup judgments in heated public debates.