Education is widely believed to predict attitudes toward immigration, but what causal relationship underlies this descriptive pattern? This research employs three distinct natural experiments and considers genetic factors to triangulate this relationship: Study 1 analyses discordant monozygotic twins; Study 2 assesses the impact of a Swedish education reform; and Study 3 analyses dizygotic twins with the use of a polygenic index for education, a DNA-based measure for genetic predispositions toward education. The results indicate that education does modestly promote open views toward immigration (Study 1), yet the reform’s effect remains uncertain (Study 2). Study 3 offers direct evidence of the effects of genetic predispositions and suggests that genetics related to education may influence attitudes beyond achieved educational attainment. These findings confirm the positive impact of education while pointing to the combined influence of genetic and social pathways in shaping immigration attitudes.

The consequences of migration-induced diversity for social cohesion have received significant attention, yet recent research also highlights the positive influence of social trust in shaping native-born people’s perceptions and views on immigration. It remains unclear, however, whether the relationship is partially driven by prosociality, which is closely associated with but distinct from trust, or other confounders. This study uses survey data from a large sample of Swedish twins to examine these relationships, with twin fixed effects to control for confounding factors shared within families. The findings show that generalised social trust and several forms of prosocial behaviour are associated with pro-immigration policy views. In the identical twin sub-sample, only the trust effects remain robust. The influence of trust appears independent of prosociality, but mainly relates to immigrant acceptance. The findings support that generalised trust contains an inclusive outlook and have important implications for discussions surrounding immigration and social cohesion. 

Research on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust suggests that this association is often negative, but not universal. Rather, interethnic exposure is argued to be a key condition underlying a negative relationship. This study builds on prior research and uses micro-context data to examine the role of casual interethnic exposure in one’s immediate surroundings. I investigate its relationship with generalised trust and multiple theoretically relevant outcomes, accounting for potential genetic confounding and exploring the moderating role of predisposition to neuroticism using a genetics-based measure. The findings indicate that casual interethnic exposure is associated with slightly lower generalised trust, but has minimal or inconsistent associations with other attitudinal and behavioural outcomes related to outgroup negativity and social avoidance. Moreover, its negative association with trust is more pronounced among individuals predisposed to neuroticism. These findings suggest that the influence of casual interethnic exposure, as a common way individuals experience diversity, is limited in scope; however, for trust, its negative association can be moderated by individual differences related to sensitivity to social contexts.