Perspective taking can promote short-term inclusionary behavior toward Syrian refugees

Abstract

Social scientists have shown how easily individuals are moved to exclude outgroup members. Can we foster inclusion instead? This study leverages one of the most significant humanitarian crises of our time to test whether, and under what conditions, American citizens adopt more inclusionary behavior toward Syrian refugees. We conduct a nationally representative survey of over 5,000 American citizens in the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election and experimentally test whether a perspective-taking exercise increases inclusionary behavior in the form of an anonymous letter supportive of refugees to be sent to the 45th President of the United States. Our results indicate that the perspective-taking message increases the likelihood of writing such a positive letter by two to five percentage points. By contrast, an informational message had no significant effect on letter writing. The effect of the perspective-taking exercise occurs in the short run only, manifests as a behavioral rather than an attitudinal response, and is strongest among Democrats. However, this effect also appears in the subset of Republican respondents, suggesting that efforts to promote perspective taking may move to action a wide cross-section of individuals.

Empathy, deservingness, and preferences for welfare assistance: A large-scale online perspective-taking experiment

“…Overall, our results point to potential limitations of either perspective-taking as a silver bullet assumed to reduce group stereotypes or a commonly used implementation thereof. Contrary to recent high-quality research that has demonstrated how brief stimuli can lead to opinion change towards marginalized out-groups (Adida, Lo and Platas 2018;Simonovits, Kézdi and Kardos 2018), our findings provide a counterexample to the power of this paradigm. More generally, similarly to Kuziemko et al (2015), we provide evidence on the rigidity of preferences towards redistribution even in the face of seemingly powerful treatment designed to facilitate perspective-taking with the poor.…”

“…Recently, a number of carefully executed experimental studies in political science have successfully deployed perspective-taking interventions in order to reduce prejudice against members of the Roma minority in Hungary (Simonovits, Kézdi and Kardos 2018), refugees in the U.S. (Adida, Lo and Platas 2018) and transgender individuals (Broockman 2016). The positiveand in some cases long-lasting -effect of these interventions is all the more surprising given that they were based on brief stimuli and, in some cases, without any personal contact with a member of an out-group.…”

Collective Victimhood and Social Prejudice: A Post‐Holocaust Theory of Anti‐Semitism

“…Although our focus has been on anti-Semitism, our findings also apply to other minority groups-immigrants, Muslims, homosexuals, or blacks, to name some examples. Various studies have tried to identify ways through which we can reduce outgroup prejudice (Adida, Lo, & Platas, 2018;Broockman & Kalla, 2016;Paluck, 2009;Paluck & Green, 2009). One of the key factors emerging from this work is past experience of victimhood.…”

Specifying the information effect: reference points and procedural justifications affect legal attitudes in four survey experiments

“…That is, it might be argued that the positive effect of decision information was caused by people taking the perspective of a judge, which could cause them to be more nuanced in their reactions. It is known that perspective taking helps people to better empathize and gives them more positive views of the person whose perspective is taken, such as refugees (e.g., Adida et al 2018). Therefore, in our second experiment (N = 406), we employed a factorial design of 2 (information × no information) by 2 (perspective-taking × no perspective-taking) between-subjects variables.…”