Economic crisis, human values and attitudes towards immigrants

Recent decades have seen some European countries experiencing a new wave of migratory rates that have sustained economic growth and simultaneously contributed to changes in the pattems of customs, life styles, values and religions. Alongside this new European setting, ambivalent positions in the attitude domain have emerged. This occurs because in contemporary democratic societies people are embedded within cultural environments that disseminate a social discourse stressing that good people are egalitarian and non-discriminatory.

Marketing social : estratégia de promoção da inclusão social e da educação intercultural

Relatório de estágio de mestrado, Ciências da Educação (Educação Intercultural), Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Educação, 2011

Intergroup Relations and Fundamental Dimensions of Social Judgment

The goal of this paper is to review the literature on the fundamental dimensions of social judgment and reflect on how these can help to boost our understanding of attitudes towards immigrants. We start by reviewing the work on the “fundamental dimensions” along which these judgments are organized, describing the different conceptions that have been put forward, identifying the regularities found in the content of these dimensions and the distinctions between them. Next, we propose a new way of looking at these fundamental dimensions by situating them within the specific field of intergroup relations in an immigration context, and explain how all the different examples of dimensions map onto this “new perspective”. We conclude by discussing how these two dimensions mirror the two fundamental topics that organize the discourse and the opinions about immigrants and immigration in society, and how attitudes towards immigrants can be differentially shaped by these two fundamental dimensions.