Immigrants' Personalities Strongly Affect Natives' Immigrant Preferences in the UK

Over the last decades, the topic of how immigrant characteristics affect natives’ attitudes has received increasing attention by political scientists. This paper aims at contributing to this literature by examining the impact of immigrants’ personality profiles on natives’ preferences towards said immigrants in a novel, preregistered conjoint experiment based on representative survey data from the UK. We employ a more fine-grained and yet theoretically more well-rounded item inventory, namely the Big Five Aspect Scales (BFAS) to measure personality for both immigrants and respondents. While the psychological literature on personality has come to the consensus that personality can be sufficiently statistically reduced to five dimensions, the standard Big Five personality model lumps together a multitude of characteristics into a single trait. Although such characteristics may correlate strongly with each other, this does not necessarily imply that they are theoretically indistinct or even seen as capturing the same concept by ordinary people. In contrast, the BFAS splits up each of the Big Five personality traits into two more theoretically recognizable sub-traits, named aspects. This innovation does not only allow us to study the effects of personality with greater specificity, it also drastically improves on face validity. Overall, this paper’s main findings are three-fold: First, we show that immigrants’ personalities have a strong causal effect on natives’ propensities to admit immigrants into the United Kingdom. Most notably, we find that immigrants scoring higher on personality aspects Intellect, Industriousness, Enthusiasm, Compassion and Politeness, those who score lower on Volatility as well as with medium Assertiveness scores receive more favorable evaluations from British natives. These effects generally square well with the literature on immigration attitudes that has emphasized either economic or cultural explanations for differences in people’s attitudes. This conclusion is robust to simultaneously presenting survey respondents with information on immigrant characteristics that have been employed by traditional conjoint studies on immigration. Second, inspired by the related literature on matching individual differences for politicians and voters as well as the assortative mating literature on personality, we demonstrate that congruence in personality attributes between immigrants and natives can play a role in natives’ evaluations of immigrants. However, this finding is mostly confined to personality aspect Openness. In contrast, the data more generally suggest that natives scoring high in certain socially desirable traits often disproportionately punish immigrants who differ markedly in their personal predispositions on the basis of personality. This constitutes a considerable deviance from the personality congruence literature for other outcomes. Third, we do not find evidence for the idea that natives’ preferences on immigrants’ personalities have a compounding effect when said immigrants are signaled to hail from more culturally distinct countries compared to Britain. Our findings demonstrate the crucial relevance of personality psychology to scholars interested in studying why some immigrants are preferred by natives over others.