E-MINDFUL glossary #1: attitudes to migration, values, migrants, refugees and much more…
26 November 2021
Join us as we learn more about attitudes, migration and much more. As the project unfolds, we will publish a few terms at every issue so that this glossary can help get oriented with the project activities and outcomes. The glossary will not follow an alphabetical order but rather a conceptual one, clustering terms around key topics under discussion. In this issue, we will explore factors that shape our perception of the world and our attitudes towards others, including migrants.
Beliefs
Beliefs are a set of ideas and feelings that a person accepts in good faith as true, even though some – or all - of them are unproven or irrational. They are not necessarily based on facts. In the course of our lives we build a set of postulates about how the world works: the more we gain experience about a certain topic or within a certain group of people, the more our beliefs take on consistency and are enriched with nuances. On the contrary, when our experiences about someone or something is limited, we could resort to generalizations and analogies based on isolated experiences or other beliefs, to fill our knowledge gaps.
Values
Values reflect how we think things ought to be and people ought to behave. They are a long-standing set of principles that a person or a community considers important up to the point that they are taken as criteria for evaluating the many people and situations encountered in everyday life (what is good, wrong, unjust, etc.). Within the same culture or communities we can find values that conflict with each other or are divisive, thus determining a polarization
Cognitive dissonance
When we are confronted with an element that does not match with our beliefs and values, a sense of uneasiness usually arises, which is called “cognitive dissonance”. Our brain responds by trying to suppress this unpleasant feeling and it does so by changing the meaning given to the event so that it can correspond to our worldview. Unconsciously, people’s brains prefer shortcuts—reviewing conflicting information so that it can fit with already existing conclusions or rejecting the information that cannot fit.
Attitudes
Attitudes are an expression of a favorable or unfavorable evaluation of a person, place, situation, or event, at some level of intensity. Attitudes are based on our beliefs and values. Our behaviors tend to reflect our attitudes. Under certain circumstances, life experiences can have an influence in changing attitudes.
Attitudes to migration
There are different types of attitudes to migration that can be roughly clustered into the following groups: 1. attitudes towards migration-related policy, such as whether to be favorable to allow more or fewer migrants into one’s country; 2. attitudes towards a specific migrant group originating from a specific country or associated with a certain religion or a certain behaviour; 3. attitudes toward all migrants, regardless their origin and other personal features; 4. attitudes towards perceived effects of migration, such as attitudes regarding the impact of immigration on the Gross Domestic Product per capita of a country, attitudes regarding the effect of immigration on national unemployment or attitudes regarding the effect of immigration on national culture or the quality of life of the locals.
A person can hold different attitudes to migration at once, including divergent ones. For instance, an individual can be against allowing more immigrants, refugees or asylum seekers into the country and at the same time be favourable to the granting of rights to the immigrants already in the country (such as allowing them to access social benefits).