La présente thèse traite de la place prise par l’identification à la nation d’accueil et l’adoption de la culture majoritaire dans les attitudes des membres de la majorité envers les minorités issues de l’immigration ainsi que dans les processus d’intégration de ces minorités. À travers une série d’études expérimentales, la première partie de la thèse démontre que les membres de la majorité tendent à considérer l’adoption de la culture majoritaire par les personnes issues de l’immigration comme un marqueur de leur identification à la nation d’accueil. De plus, cette perception d’attachement identitaire est apparue comme un facteur central dans la construction des attitudes envers les personnes issues de l’immigration. Cette première partie se conclut avec une étude suggérant que, dans un contexte de parcours d’intégration obligatoire où l’adoption culturelle est rendue obligatoire, les membres de la majorité ont tendance à inférer moins d’identification à la nation et par conséquent à percevoir plus négativement les personnes issues de l’immigration comparativement à un contexte où ils sont dépeints comme adoptant la culture majoritaire spontanément. Dans une deuxième partie de la thèse, nous nous sommes intéressés à la place prise par l’adoption de la culture et l’identification au pays d’accueil dans le processus d’intégration des personnes issues de l’immigration. Comme nous en avions fait l’hypothèse, l’adoption de la culture majoritaire apparaît prioritaire chez les demandeurs d’asile syriens et irakiens qui viennent d’arriver sur le territoire belge. Finalement, sur base des données Eurislam récoltées à travers plusieurs pays européens auprès de différentes minorités, nous discutons du lien entre la maitrise de la langue du pays d’accueil et l’identification nationale. Sur base d’une analyse de profils, nous suggérons qu’il est important de considérer l’adoption de la culture et l’identification à la nation comme deux dimensions différentes à prendre en considération tant dans les futures recherches que dans les dispositifs politiques d’intégration. / Doctorat en Sciences psychologiques et de l'éducation / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Stereotypes are often considered to exist as a consequence of categorizing people into different groups, our belonging (or not) to the group, and our exposure to perceived covariation between group member’s physical and psychological characteristics However, the process of stereotype learning itself is not always taken into account. In my thesis, I hypothesized that people will categorize artificial social stimuli into groups, and learn to associate them with descriptions compatible with stereotype content, even if they are not actively made aware of such a connection. This learning process is influenced by the individuals process on the one, and its social environment on the other. First, we find that people learn stereotypes in the absence of explicit information about the existence of social outgroups. For stimuli with equal baseline valence, the contrast between perceived stereotypes was stronger when the stereotypical information was more distinctive for one social group over the other. When baseline valence was not the same, stereotype-consistent information increased this difference while non-stereotypical information led to less stereotypical differentiation between the groups.Second, when participants are themselves part of a group, stereotype consistent information is readily integrated into the group impression. For stereotype inconsistent information, and within the context of experimentally induced group belonging, participants did learn the (counter) stereotypical information, but the identification with the group decreased. Finally, the focus is again on outgroup stereotype learning, but this time in the context of small social networks. The aim here was to isolate network structure from social interaction per se and investigate whether structure alone influences the emergence of stereotypes. People learned from each other in these distinct network configurations, i.e. in a fully connected network or a star network. Different from the other studies, participants decided themselves how a member of our experimental social groups was presented to other participants. This way, we could observe whether stereotypes emerge as a consequence of social interaction, restricted by their network ties. We found that participants will learn outgroup stereotypes consistent with the covariation between group stimuli and description to which they were exposed in their respective network. However, the network structure itself does not contribute to stereotype learning or emergence. / Doctorat en Sciences psychologiques et de l'éducation / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Language is one of the main means of acquiring information about the world. An important debate in social psychology, linguistics and philosophy is how we come to believe information contained in statements we hear and read. Are we capable of assessing it and filtering it out, in case it is erroneous? Or do we rather tend to believe it? The experimental studies described in this thesis suggest that we strongly tend to believe statements we hear and read, even if we are aware of their falsity. Truth bias, as this tendency has been called, was detected both at the level of people’s memory and at the level of their judgments. Specifically, in a fake judicial context participants who read or listened to statements explicitly designated as true or false about a perpetrator tended to misremember false statements as true. Additionally, they were influenced by the false statements’ content in judgments they made about the perpetrators. Chapter 1 encompasses 5 Studies, all pointing to a strong truth bias, that, contrary to what is often assumed, may operate even in the absence of increased cognitive load (Studies 1–2). Studies 3–5 in Chapter 1 were methodologically-oriented, primarily aimed at testing the validity of the generalized truth bias established in Studies 1–2. Chapter 2 examines potential vigilance triggers that may reduce the truth bias. Manipulating the source of the false information (by informing participants that the speaker is either a defense attorney or prosecutor; Study 1), rendering participants accountable for their judgments (Study 2) or asking real judges to accomplish our experimental task (Study 3) did not reduce the truth bias. Nevertheless, offering participants financial incentives for providing an accurate judgment, eliminated both the memory-based and the judgment-based truth bias (Study 4). Based on the present experimental findings, I develop a model predicting that the truth bias is an intrinsic element of linguistic communication and hard to override. / Doctorat en Sciences psychologiques et de l'éducation / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished