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

Abstract

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.

Non-political anger shifts political preferences towards stronger leaders

“…Although previous studies using the same leader choice task did not reveal any retest effect 19,31 , the pre-post nature of our experiment design still creates the possibility that the results we obtained are not related to the induction of anger but only to the repetition of the task. Nonetheless, three elements provide evidence that the reported effect is truly related to incidental anger and not simply to a test-retest effect.…”

The Opinions of Poles about the Need to Provide Humanitarian Aid to Refugees from the Area Covered by the Russian–Ukrainian War

“…Empathic references of young respondents from the perspective of medical assistance can confirm the results of other studies that show a presentation of refugees in the media, where images of small groups of people with visible faces generate aid and pro-humanitarian actions. On the other hand, images of large groups are evaluated as more reluctant, especially in combination with metadata, for example, headers (titles) from newspapers [ 33 ]. In the third module, respondents had to answer whether general material assistance and military support from Poland and the whole world was sufficient and were asked to express opinions on aid decisions made by the European Parliament and the European Union, as well as restrictions taken against Russia.…”

The Routledge International Handbook of Discrimination, Prejudice and Stereotyping

“…Schemer (2013) supports these results, based on data of a three-wave panel analysis with Swiss participants: The more frequently respondents were exposed to negative news portrayals of asylum seekers, the more negative were their attitudes toward this group (see also Theorin, 2019, for similar results with Swedish respondents). Finally, Azevedo, De Beukelaer, Jones, Safra, and Tsakiris (2019) found experimental evidence with subjects from different European states showing that visually presenting immigrants in large groups moving to Europe leads to more dehumanized perceptions of refugees compared to images depicting small groups.…”