Australian Attitudes Toward Asylum Seekers: Roles of Dehumanization and Social Dominance Theory

Trounson, Justin S.; Critchley, Christine; Pfeifer, Jeffrey E.

doi:10.2224/sbp.2015.43.10.1641

Cited by 22 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…Similarly, Louis et al () demonstrated that participants who preferred a hierarchical structure (social dominance orientation) were more likely to endorse the restriction of asylum seekers' access to Australia. More recent research has supported these earlier studies and found that individuals who score high on social dominance ratings have more negative attitudes towards asylum seekers (Anderson, Stuart, & Rossen, ; Perry, Paradies, & Pedersen, ; Trounson, Critchley, & Pfeifer, ).…”

Section: Predictors Of Negative Attitudesmentioning

confidence: 63%

Predicting community attitudes towards asylum seekers: A multi‐component model

O’Connor

Pedersen

Breen

2017

Australian Journal of Psychology

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Objective: The current study investigated the role of cognitive, affective, and behavioural information in the prediction of overall attitudes towards asylum seekers. Method: A sample of 98 Australian adults participated in an online self-report questionnaire where participants generated their cognitive, affective, and behavioural factors towards asylum seekers and then rated those factors on a continuum from 'positive' to 'negative'. Results: Multiple regression analysis confirmed the primary role of cognitive, then affective, factors in predicting attitudes towards asylum seekers. Cognitive information accounted for a moderate, significant 31.92% of the variance in overall attitudes towards asylum seekers. The unique variance contributed by affective information accounted for a small but significant 3.46% of the variance in overall attitudes; the unique variance contributed by behavioural information was not significant. Conclusions: The results provide a holistic theoretical basis for the assertion that community attitudes towards asylum seekers are based primarily on cognitive evaluations of the minority group. These findings have implications for changing community attitudes towards people seeking asylum in Australia.

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Section: Predictors Of Negative Attitudesmentioning

confidence: 63%

Predicting community attitudes towards asylum seekers: A multi‐component model

O’Connor

Pedersen

Breen

2017

Australian Journal of Psychology

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“…Despite the large proportion of migrants and children of migrants that make up the Australian population (and not forgetting the long history of migrant intake since European settlement) there have, throughout Australia's European history, been ongoing social, political and economic anxieties about the type and amount of migrants that the nation can sustain (Walker 1999). As outlined in the introduction to this article, such anxieties have recently manifest in proposed and actual changes to Australia's migration and multiculturalism policies, and government and media discourses that vilify asylum seekers, particularly those arriving by sea (Every and Augoustinos 2007;McKay et al 2012, Trounson et al 2015.…”

Section: Perception Of Migrant Intakesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such increases in racist incidents have coincided with a (failed) political attempt to amend/repeal Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act-a legislative protection from 'offensive behaviour because of race, colour or national or ethnic origin' (Racial Discrimination Act 1975, s.18C). Australia's formal humanitarian intake of asylum seekers and refugees coexists alongside its policy of indefinite detention in offshore centres for asylum seekers arriving by sea, and government and media discourse that vilifies asylum seekers and feeds anti-asylum seeker sentiments (Augoustinos and Quinn 2003; Pedersen et al 2006;Every and Augoustinos 2007;McKay et al 2012, Trounson et al 2015. Our anticipation is that these contradictory political discourses and the demographic realities will be reflected in contradictory attitudes on Australian multiculturalism.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Australians’ Views on Cultural Diversity, Nation and Migration, 2015-16

et al. 2017

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Between July and August 2015, and in November 2016, the Challenging Racism Project team conducted an online survey to measure the extent and variation of racist attitudes and experiences in Australia. The survey comprised a sample of 6001 Australian residents, which was largely representative of the Australian population. The survey gauged Australians’ attitudes toward cultural diversity, intolerance of specific groups, immigration, perceptions of Anglo-Celtic cultural privilege, and belief in racialism, racial separatism and racial hierarchy. In this paper we report findings on respondents’ views on cultural diversity, nation and migration. The majority of Australians are pro-diversity. However, we also acknowledge conflicting findings such as strong support for assimilation and identification of ‘out groups’. The findings paint a complex picture of attitudes towards cultural diversity, nation and migration in Australia. The attitudes reflect contradictory political trends of celebrated diversity, triumphalist claims about freedom, alongside pro-assimilationist views and stoked Islamophobia. This is within the context of a stalled multicultural project that has not sufficiently challenged assimilationist assumptions and Anglo-privilege.

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“…We, therefore, set out to investigate whether these dominant depictions lead to the dehumanization of refugees in the eyes of the beholders, in other words, the perception of them as lacking, or possessing to a lesser extent uniquely human traits (Haslam and Loughnan, 2014), alongside other groups, e.g. homeless (Harris and Fiske, 2006), Black-Africans (Goff et al, 2008), Arabs (Kteily et al, 2015), survivors of natural disasters (SND) (Andrighetto et al, 2014), immigrants Leyens et al, 2007;Trounson et al, 2015). We hypothesized that exposing audiences to images of large groups of refugees, as opposed to small groups of refugees, would result in greater implicit dehumanization.…”

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confidence: 99%

When the lens is too wide: The political consequences of the visual dehumanization of refugees

Azevedo

Beukelaer

Jones

et al. 2021

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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Photojournalistic images shape our understanding of sociopolitical events. How humans are depicted in images may have far-reaching consequences for our attitudes towards them. Social psychology has shown how the visualization of an ‘identifiable victim effect’ can elicit empathic responses. However, images of identifiable victims in the media are the exception rather than the norm. In the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, the majority of images in Western media depicted refugees as large unidentifiable groups. While the effects of the visual depiction of single individuals are well-known, the ways in which the visual framing of large groups operates, and its social and political consequences, remain unknown. We here focus on the visual depiction of refugees to understand how exposure to the dominant visual framing used in the media, depicting them in large groups of faceless individuals, affects their dehumanization and sets off political consequences. To that end we brought together insights from social psychology, social sciences and the humanities to test a range of hypotheses using methods from social and political psychology in 10 studies with the participation of 3951 European citizens. Seeing images of large groups resulted in greater implicit dehumanization compared with images depicting refugees in small groups. Images of large groups are also explicitly rated as more dehumanizing, and when coupled with meta-data such as newspaper headlines, images continue to play a significant and independent role on how (de)humanizing we perceive such news coverage to be. Moreover, after viewing images of large groups, participants showed increased preference for more dominant and less trustworthy-looking political leaders and supported fewer pro-refugee policies and more anti-refugee policies. In terms of a mechanistic understanding of these effects, the extent to which participants felt pity for refugees depicted in large groups as opposed to small groups mediated the effect of visual framing on the choice of a more authoritarian-looking leader. What we see in the media and how it is shown not only has consequences for the ways in which we relate to other human beings and our behaviour towards them but, ultimately, for the functioning of our political systems.

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Australian Attitudes Toward Asylum Seekers: Roles of Dehumanization and Social Dominance Theory

Cited by 22 publications

References 0 publications

Predicting community attitudes towards asylum seekers: A multi‐component model

Predicting community attitudes towards asylum seekers: A multi‐component model

Australians’ Views on Cultural Diversity, Nation and Migration, 2015-16

When the lens is too wide: The political consequences of the visual dehumanization of refugees

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