Are we more welcoming as neighbors or as citizens? Collective psychological ownership and attitudes toward immigrants

Abstract

While place attachment is an emotional bond with a place, collective psychological ownership is a similar feeling but additionally implies that the place belongs to “us”. Socio-psychological research points to the negative consequences of this feeling for attitudes toward immigrants. However, we argue that this link can vary depending on the place scale. We examined the psychological and demographic predictors and intergroup consequences of collective psychological ownership across three territories: neighborhood, city, and country, and compared those relationships with those observed for place attachment. Using a city-wide sample of Warsaw residents (N = 493), we found that neither collective psychological ownership of the city nor of the country were significantly related with acceptance of Ukrainian refugees. Meanwhile, for neighborhood as target of ownership there was a positive relationship. Further, sense of ownership of the neighborhood was predicted by need for power, while sense of ownership of the city – by need for autonomy. In relation to the country, neither need for power nor need for autonomy played a significant role. Instead, conservative political views emerged as a significant predictor, unlike in the other two places. Analysis of open-ended responses to the question about who are the ‘owners’ of each of the three places additionally revealed that the categorization for the country level tended to be based on nationality and for neighborhood it was more diverse. Altogether, our findings indicate that the meaning of psychological ownership may vary for places with different scales, resulting in positive intergroup outcomes of collective ownership in places with less rigid boundaries.