Social Distance toward Syrian Refugees: The Role of Intergroup Anxiety in Facilitating Positive Relations

Abstract

The number of asylum seekers and refugees across the world is rapidly increasing. Negative attitudes toward these groups are globally prevalent and typically hostile because most receiving country citizens perceive them to be a security threat and an economic burden. This paper aims to understand the antecedents of negative attitudes toward a large refugee group currently garnering a great deal of attention-Syrian refugees, and experimentally test ways to ameliorate negative attitudes. In Study 1 (N = 122), we investigated predictors of social distance-as a proxy for prejudice-and found right-wing authoritarianism and intergroup anxiety to be significant predictors. In Study 2 (N = 162), we tested whether perceived acculturation orientation would predict social distance and found that Americans were less prejudiced toward Syrians who preferred to assimilate rather than integrate. Finally, in Study 3 (N = 153), we tested if a form of vicarious contact could reduce social distance via reduced intergroup anxiety; we found initial evidence for this mediation link. We discussed the potential for the vicarious contact intervention to foster positive intergroup relations and contribute to refugee wellbeing.

Not Just a National Issue: Effect of State‐Level Reception of Immigrants and Population Changes on Intergroup Attitudes of Whites, Latinos, and Asians in the United States

“…Individuals were also presented with information about rate of immigration into the state (increasing vs. stable). High rates of demographic change in a community brought about by immigration can influence how people think about newcomers (Hopkins, ; Koc & Anderson, ) and either offset or exacerbate the influence of local policies about immigrant reception. The effect of these two factors on individuals’ perceptions of social groups including immigrants was then assessed across three U.S. ethnic groups: Whites, Latinos, and Asians.…”

Differences, Threats, Values, and Country‐Specific Prejudice toward Immigrants and Foreign Workers in Three Major Receiving Countries: The United States, Germany, and Australia

“…The stronger effect of the value of individual uniqueness in the U.S. compared to Germany might indicate that the value of individual uniqueness combined with the high level of racial and ethnic diversity in the U.S. facilitates more frequent favorable intergroup contacts in the U.S. compared to in Germany in which the value of individual uniqueness is stronger but the level of racial and ethnic diversity is lower than in the U.S. (see also Kotzur, Tropp, & Wagner, ). Future research that includes a greater range of countries and/or factors (e.g., other types of threats, see Abeywickrama et al., ; or the degree or types of acculturation of immigrant groups, see Koc & Anderson, ) that are not examined in the present research could thus help identify the particular kinds of factors that determine prejudice toward immigrants and foreign workers. This line of research might also consider systematic community‐level differences within each country (see Silka, ), acknowledging the potential diversity of responses within national boundaries to further illuminate the dynamics of prejudice toward immigrants.…”

“…Understanding beliefs and attitudes about the groups that exemplify immigrants and foreign workers in each country can thus help illuminate why some predictors may bear a relatively strong or weak relationship to prejudice in each country. Future research might therefore devote more attention to exploring how the racial or ethnic groups or the migrant types (e.g., economic migrant and refugees; see Abeywickrama, Laham, & Crone, ; Koc & Anderson, ) that are most strongly associated with immigration in each country account for degrees and dynamics of responses to immigrants. Such research might also consider whether different types of immigrant status (e.g., illegal or undocumented; see Marshall & Shapiro, ) elicit different responses and why.…”

“…However, one disadvantage of using the WVS is that there are only a limited number of items that directly address the concepts of interest in the current research. In the present study, prejudice was assessed using a WVS item that measured social distance (see Bogardus, ; see also Koc & Anderson, ) to “immigrants and foreign workers” rather than to specific immigrant groups in each country. Because the groups that respondents perceive as representing “immigrants and foreign workers” likely differ in the U.S., Germany, and Australia, we focused on the associations between the predictors and prejudice rather than on the degrees of prejudice across the three countries.…”

The Reception of Immigrants and Refugees in Western Countries: The Challenges of Our Time

“…The final article in this section by Koc and Anderson () provides further evidence that threat perceptions predict social distance toward Syrian refugees. In particular, they find that intergroup anxiety predicts the likelihood of seeking social distance from Syrian refugees, but also that perceived assimilation by Syrian refugees was associated with less social distance seeking than perceived integration.…”