An Experimental Study on the Variation of the Attitudes towards the Syrian Refugees in Turkey

Abstract

Is it possible to change the negative public attitudes towards refugees? Which factors reinforce such attitudinal changes? Since the refugee population is growing in many countries, finding answers to these questions has become even more important. By focusing on the Turkish context, this study has two specific objectives. First, we aim to find out how-and to what extent-the individual level of prejudice towards the Syrian refugees differs when the refugees are depicted in either empathy or threat-evoking conditions. Second, we try to show the interaction between personal dispositions (authoritarianism) and situational factors (threat-evoking condition) and their explanatory power on the individuals' prejudice towards the Syrian refugees. Towards this end, we conducted a surveyexperiment with 120 university students in May 2016. The empirical results show that while empathyevoking treatment leads to a decrease in prejudice, the threat-evoking one augments the biased attitudes towards the Syrian refugees. When the dispositional factors are included in the model, we observe that authoritarianism's interaction with threat-evoking treatment significantly effects the prejudice levels.

Attitudes of the Host Population towards Syrian Refugees: A New Theoretical Perspective

“…This study examines the attitudes of the host community toward Syrian refugees from the perspective of threats and opportunities. Quantitative studies in Turkey examine the attitudes of the host community towards Syrian refugees [30,[42][43][44][45] . However, it is observed that there is a limited number of qualitative studies that provide in-depth information on this topic in the literature (e.g., [46] ), and there is no study that examines attitudes towards Syrian refugees using the TFM.…”