An Experimental Study on the Variation of the Attitudes towards the Syrian Refugees in Turkey

Abstract

By conducting a survey experiment on 120 university students in Turkey, this study has two objectives. First, we aim to find out how -and to what extent- students' levels of prejudice towards the Syrian refugees differ when the refugees are depicted in either empathy or threat-evoking conditions. Second, we try to show the interaction between personal dispositions (authoritarianism) and situational factors (threat evoking condition) and their explanatory power on the students’ prejudice towards the Syrian refugees in Turkey. Our empirical results show that empathy-evoking manipulation makes individuals less prejudiced towards the Syrian refugees. Our second finding asserts that the students who read the threat-evoking text display a higher level of prejudice towards the Syrian refugees. Finally, although we anticipated that authoritarianism displays a significant main effect on the prejudice levels, the current results did not validate this hypothesis. In other words, the empirical results show that there is a significant negative interaction effect between the threat-evoking stimulus and authoritarianism on the students’ level of prejudice. That is to say, threat-evoking text displayed a significant impact for respondents who had lower scores than the mean level of authoritarianism; and in turn, although these people were the less authoritarians, they had a greater level of prejudice, after they read the text, compared to ones in the neutral condition.