📄 social_science

Misinformation, Not Ignorance: Factual Misperception, Perceived Threat, and Opposition to Co-ethnic Immigrant Inclusion

Using a survey of South Korean adults, this study demonstrates that opposition to co-ethnic immigrant inclusion is driven not by a lack of knowledge but by the presence of specific false beliefs that heighten perceived threat, suggesting that fact-provision campaigns are less effective than correcting misinformation narratives.

Original authors: Youngmi Choi, Youngho Song

Published 2026-09-21

📖 6 min read🧠 Deep dive

CC BY 4.0

Original authors: Youngmi Choi, Youngho Song

Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ✨ This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer

In the study of how people form opinions about immigration, a long-standing idea suggests that fear drives exclusion. When people believe that newcomers are dangerous, taking jobs, or breaking laws, they tend to oppose policies that welcome them. This fear is often linked to what researchers call "perceived threat," a feeling that a group poses a risk to safety, economic security, or cultural values. For decades, experts assumed that if people simply knew the facts—such as the actual number of immigrants or their real crime rates—this fear would vanish. The logic was that ignorance was the root of the problem: if you didn't know the truth, you would imagine the worst. However, a newer line of thinking questions whether the problem is actually a lack of information or something more stubborn: the confident holding of false beliefs. This distinction matters deeply because it changes how we might try to fix the problem. If the issue is just not knowing, providing facts should work. If the issue is believing something wrong with certainty, simply handing out facts might not be enough.

A recent study by researchers Youngmi Choi and Youngho Song investigates this exact question, focusing on a unique group in South Korea: the Korean-Chinese, also known as Joseonjok. These are people of Korean descent who hold Chinese citizenship. They occupy a complicated space in the public mind; they are seen as "family" by blood but "foreigners" by law. The researchers wanted to know if this shared heritage protected them from the usual anti-immigrant backlash, or if false beliefs about them still caused fear and opposition to their inclusion. To find out, they surveyed 1,036 South Korean adults, asking them a series of questions about the legal status, rights, and behavior of Korean-Chinese people. The questions had clear, objective answers. For instance, respondents were asked if Korean-Chinese people could vote in national elections (they cannot), if they had special privileges for college admission (they do not), and if their crime rates were higher than those of native Koreans (they are actually lower).

The results revealed a striking pattern. A significant portion of the public held incorrect beliefs about these facts. Nearly half of the respondents believed that the crime rate among Korean-Chinese residents was higher than that of native Koreans, and about a third thought there were special college quotas for them. When the researchers analyzed how these beliefs affected people's support for inclusive policies, they found that the false beliefs were the engine driving opposition. The more a person believed these incorrect facts, the more threatened they felt, and the less they supported policies that would help Korean-Chinese people settle and thrive. Crucially, the study showed that this fear was not caused by a lack of knowledge. People who simply said "I don't know" did not show the same level of fear or opposition as those who confidently believed the wrong things. In fact, having accurate knowledge did not significantly lower fear compared to having no opinion at all. The only thing that reliably increased fear and reduced support for inclusion was the presence of specific, confident false beliefs.

This finding challenges the common assumption that shared identity acts as a shield. One might expect that because Korean-Chinese people are ethnically Korean, the general public would be more forgiving of them or less likely to believe negative rumors. The study found that while people with a strong sense of shared ethnic identity did, on average, support inclusion more than those without that feeling, this identity did not stop the false beliefs from causing fear. Even among those who felt a strong kinship with Korean-Chinese people, believing that they were criminals or had special privileges still led to a sharp rise in perceived threat and a drop in support for inclusive policies. The shared identity lowered the overall baseline of fear, but it did not block the path from a wrong belief to a fearful reaction. It is as if the identity provided a slightly softer cushion, but it could not stop a heavy stone of misinformation from hitting the ground.

The researchers also looked closely at which specific false beliefs mattered most. They found that the belief that Korean-Chinese people had a higher crime rate was the single most powerful driver of fear and opposition. This specific misconception, which linked the group directly to safety threats, had a much stronger effect than other false ideas, such as beliefs about voting rights or college quotas. This suggests that when people imagine a group as a physical danger, it overrides other considerations more powerfully than abstract ideas about fairness or identity. The study also confirmed that these effects were not just a reflection of general dislike for all foreigners. Even when the researchers accounted for a person's general attitude toward immigrants, the specific false beliefs about Korean-Chinese people still predicted opposition to their inclusion. This means the problem was not just generic xenophobia, but a specific set of mistaken ideas about this particular group.

The implications of these findings are significant for how societies try to manage immigration and integration. If the problem were simply a lack of information, the solution would be to provide more facts and statistics. However, because the study shows that the problem is the confident holding of false beliefs, simply flooding the public with data may not work. People who are convinced that a group is dangerous may ignore facts that contradict their view. Instead, the researchers suggest that interventions need to address the specific narratives that fuel these false beliefs. Correcting the story that links Korean-Chinese people to crime, for example, requires more than just stating the crime rate; it requires dismantling the narrative that makes that false belief feel true in the first place. The study concludes that while shared heritage can be a resource for inclusion, it is not a magic shield against the power of misinformation. When people are convinced of a falsehood, that conviction drives fear and exclusion, regardless of how closely related the groups might be.

Technical Summary: Misinformation, Not Ignorance

Problem Statement
Existing literature on immigration attitudes establishes a robust link between factual misperceptions and anti-immigrant sentiment. However, this research has largely failed to distinguish between two qualitatively different cognitive states: the absence of accurate knowledge (ignorance) and the presence of confident false beliefs (misinformation). These distinctions imply divergent policy interventions; an "information deficit" model suggests that providing facts will remedy exclusionary attitudes, whereas a "misinformation" model suggests that false beliefs may be obstinate and resistant to simple fact-provision. This study addresses this gap by investigating whether the corrosive element in anti-immigrant attitudes is ignorance or misinformation, and whether perceived threat mediates this relationship. The study further examines whether shared ethnic identity (co-ethnicity) buffers the pathway from misperception to threat, testing the validity of "co-ethnic exceptionalism."

Methodology
The study utilizes a secondary analysis of a national survey of 1,036 South Korean adults conducted in March 2026. The sample was stratified by sex, age, and region to match resident-registration statistics.

Independent Variable: Factual misperception was operationalized as a count of incorrect answers (0–6) to six objectively verifiable items regarding the legal status, privileges, and crime rates of Korean-Chinese (Joseonjok) immigrants. Items included citizenship status, voting rights, special admission quotas, and relative crime rates.
Mediator: Perceived threat was measured as a composite of realistic (jobs, public safety) and symbolic/security (acting for Chinese interests) threats, based on Integrated Threat Theory.
Dependent Variable: Support for inclusive co-ethnic policy, measured via an index of four items regarding admission, residence, employment, and settlement.
Key Decomposition: To test the asymmetry between ignorance and misinformation, the authors decomposed respondents' cognitive states into three categories: correct answers, incorrect answers, and "don't know" responses. These counts were entered simultaneously into regression models with "don't know" as the reference category.
Analytic Strategy: The study employed hierarchical regression and bias-corrected bootstrapping (5,000 resamples) to test mediation. It also utilized parallel multiple-mediation models to distinguish between realistic and symbolic threat pathways. Robustness checks included Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Item Response Theory (2PL IRT), population weighting, and sensitivity analyses for unobserved confounding (E-value, Oster's δ).

Key Results

Mediation via Perceived Threat: Factual misperception significantly increases perceived threat ( $\beta = .21, p < .001$ ), which in turn significantly lowers support for inclusive policy ( $\beta = -.33, p < .001$ ). The indirect effect of misperception on policy support through threat is fully mediated ( $\text{indirect effect} = -.070$ , 95% CI $[-.092, -.048]$ ), with the direct effect becoming non-significant once threat is controlled.
Asymmetry of Effects (Misinformation vs. Ignorance): Decomposition analysis reveals a sharp asymmetry. Holding incorrect beliefs (misinformation) significantly raises perceived threat and lowers policy support. In contrast, holding accurate knowledge (correct answers) has no statistically significant effect on threat or policy attitudes relative to ignorance ("don't know"). The negative impact is driven entirely by the presence of false belief, not the absence of knowledge.
Role of Co-ethnic Identity: Co-ethnic identity functions as an independent main effect that raises baseline support for inclusion and lowers the overall baseline level of threat. However, it does not buffer the slope of the pathway from factual misperception to threat. The interaction term between misperception and co-ethnic identity is non-significant, indicating that shared descent does not shield individuals from the threat perception generated by specific factual errors.
Content Specificity: The "crime-rate misperception" (the belief that Korean-Chinese have higher crime rates than natives) is the strongest independent predictor of both perceived threat and opposition to inclusive policy, outweighing misperceptions regarding privileges or citizenship.

Significance and Contributions
The paper claims three primary scholarly contributions:

Empirical Distinction between Misinformation and Ignorance: By decomposing cognitive states, the study provides empirical evidence that the "corrosive ingredient" in anti-immigrant attitudes is confident false belief, not an information deficit. This challenges the conventional "information deficit model" and suggests that fact-provision campaigns may fail where narrative correction of specific false beliefs is required.
Extension of Integrated Threat Theory: The study extends Integrated Threat Theory by linking objectively scorable factual beliefs (rather than just diffuse affect or perceived size) to threat formation. It demonstrates that specific factual errors (e.g., about crime rates) act as concrete propositions that ignite threat perceptions, which then crystallize into policy preferences.
Qualification of Co-ethnic Exceptionalism: The findings disconfirm the assumption that co-ethnicity automatically buffers against exclusion. While shared identity raises the baseline level of inclusion, it does not neutralize the mechanism by which factual misperceptions translate into threat. This suggests that in "boundary groups" (co-ethnic yet foreign), identity operates as a resource for inclusion but fails as a shield against cognitive error, particularly when that error involves safety threats.

The authors conclude that the mechanism identified—misperception leading to threat, which drives exclusion—is generalizable to other contexts involving ancestry-based membership regimes where boundary groups are "inside" by descent but "outside" by nationality or class. The study emphasizes that the problem is not a lack of knowledge but the presence of mistaken conviction, implying that interventions must target the narrative structure of false beliefs rather than simply increasing information volume.

Technical Summary: Misinformation, Not Ignorance

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