Susceptibility to threatening information and attitudes toward refugee resettlement: The case of Japan

Abstract

A growing number of news articles and politicians’ statements treat refugees as potential terrorists. However, existing research has yet to thoroughly examine how threatening information about refugees affects natives’ attitudes toward refugee resettlement. To address this issue, we conducted a survey experiment in Japan, where the number of refugees accepted each year is extremely small, despite the rapid increase in news about refugees. Our results show that opposition to refugee resettlement is associated with its proximity. Specifically, we find two types of NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) attitudes – within-country and between-country NIMBY-ism – toward refugee resettlement among Japanese people. Additionally, respondents become more strongly opposed to refugee resettlement when exposed to threatening frames that depict refugees as harmful, regardless of the proximity to threats and potential resettlement. These findings add nuance to the scholarly literature on threat perceptions and public attitudes in intergroup relations. First, our findings suggest that NIMBY attitudes toward refugee resettlement (shown in Ferwerda, Flynn & Horiuchi, 2017) are not a US-only phenomenon. Second, we provide empirical evidence to support the theory that subjectively perceived threats affect people’s hostility toward out-group members, even in the absence of actual threats. Finally, we contribute to the recent debate on the effects of proximity to threats. Our results support the argument that the psychological effects of terrorism on negative attitudes toward immigrants and refugees are more pronounced in homogeneous societies, irrespective of proximity to the threat.

Social contact and attitudes toward outsiders: The case of Japan

“…Our previous study (Horiuchi and Ono, 2022) has shown that when natives are exposed to a news article that portrays refugees as a threat, they are more likely to oppose resettlement, regardless of whether the threat is directly related to their country, and of the resettlement location. A key question that remains is whether this strong reaction to threatening frames among the natives is homogeneous.…”

“…We fielded a survey experiment in Japan and demonstrated that people opposed refugee resettlement more strongly after being exposed to frames that depict refugees as threatening (Horiuchi and Ono, 2022). The current study extends that research.…”

“…1Our study was approved by the respective institutional review boards. For details of our survey design, see Horiuchi and Ono, (2022). The pre-analysis plan is in Section A of the Supplementary Materials.…”

“…2In our previous study, we used the outcome questions about refugee resettlement, jointly and individually, to examine respondents’ not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) attitudes and the average treatment effects of the frames (Horiuchi and Ono, 2022). However, to analyze the conditional treatment effects, we only use the average response to the aforementioned three questions.…”

Comprehensive Evaluation of NIMBY Phenomenon with Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process and Radar Chart

“…The NIMBY phenomenon refers to the fear of residents or local units that construction projects, such as transmission and transformation projects, waste-disposal plants, nuclearpower plants and funeral parlors, will bring about a number of negative impacts on physical health, environmental quality and asset value, thus stimulating people's dislike of the complex and fostering the mentality of 'do not build it in my backyard', which means they will take a strongly collective opposition and even demonstrate resistance behavior [11][12][13].…”