When Censoring Anti-Immigration Opinions Makes Them More Persuasive

Abstract: Censoring controversial attitudes is a procedure that has been shown to produce a paradoxical effect on people's attitudes. This effect causes people who are affected by the censorship to change their attitudes towards the censored standpoint – a process attributed to psychological reactance. Censorship induced reactance has been thoroughly examined by scholars for decades, but its effects on actual political behavior has received very little attention. Considering the current political discourse in Sweden, immigration policies are at the focal point. While Anti-immigration attitudes are consistently banned and ostracized in many public schools, work places and media – the only Anti-immigration party, the Sweden Democrats, is steadily gaining support in opinion polls. The aim of this study is to investigate if psychological reactance can be a contributing factor to the rise of support for the Sweden Democrats. By assessing an experimental paradigm used in previous research, a censorship will be applied on messages from the party, in order to evoke reactance. Participants' attitudes will be measured before and after being exposed to this censorship in order to assess any attitudinal effects caused by reactance. It is to be expected that the participants in the experimental group display a larger support for the Sweden Democrats after the manipulation, than the participants in the control group that was not subject to any censorship. This finding would provide better understanding of the rise of anti-immigration parties, while also contributing to the development of strategies to handle these parties and abate intolerance in society.