Framed contributor status shapes UK-resident natives' and immigrants' distributive choices and fair-share beliefs

Public demands to restrict immigrants' access to welfare typically invoke immigrants' outgroup status and their allegedly insufficient contributions. While contributions are fundamental to the welfare state, immigrants' contributions are not directly observable, which creates fertile ground for misperceptions that political rhetoric often exploits when portraying natives as the main contributors. We present results from a stylized experiment in which UK-resident natives and immigrants are paired to divide resources. We isolate how ingroup favoritism and framed contributor status shape distributive choices and fair-share beliefs, even in the absence of actual differences in contributions to the resources. We find no statistically significant effect of ingroup favoritism on choices, but both natives and immigrants claim more when framed as contributors. Making unequal allocations costly reduces claims, and secondary analyses suggest that costliness also attenuates the contributor effect. Both groups also report higher fair-share beliefs when framed as contributors than when they are not. These findings show that merely framing individuals as contributors shapes distributive preferences in self-serving ways and produces egocentrically biased fair-share beliefs. We propose that incorporating such self-serving dynamics into the microfoundations of preferences for redistribution toward immigrants could help explain exclusionary welfare preferences beyond explanations centered on anti-immigrant attitudes and nationalism.