False Beliefs About Asylum Seekers to Australia: The Role of Confidence in Such Beliefs, Prejudice, and the Third Person Effect

Anne Pedersen,Lisa K Hartley

doi:10.1017/prp.2017.5

Abstract

There has been much controversy about the treatment of asylum seekers in Australia in recent years, with the Australian Government continuing to enforce a very hard-line stance on asylum seekers who arrive to Australia by boat. The present study examined attitudes towards asylum seekers using 164 Australian community members during June 2015 by way of questionnaire. Our primary research question involved how five variables predicted false beliefs about asylum seekers. Specifically, we measured prejudice, the third-person effect, and confidence in the answers given to false beliefs about asylum seekers. Regression results indicated that the main predictors of false beliefs were right-wing political orientation, prejudice, confidence in espousing false beliefs, and the third-person effect (politicians). Furthermore, most of our community participants accepted a large number of false beliefs as being true, with approximately two-thirds of our participants scoring above the midpoint. This reflects similar findings over the last decade or so. Our results indicate that, if one believes in bottom-up change, a more nuanced approach needs to be undertaken with community anti-prejudice interventions.

Highlights

There has been much controversy about the treatment of asylum seekers in Australia in recent years, with the Australian Government continuing to enforce a very hardline stance on asylum seekers who arrive to Australia by boat
Pedersen, Watt, and Hansen (2006) found that participants who were more prejudiced against asylum seekers espoused more false beliefs; those beliefs were linked to political rhetoric
With respect to our dependent variable, we note that many participants held some false beliefs about asylum seekers, with the mean being 4.61; most scored above the midpoint

Summary

Introduction

There has been much controversy about the treatment of asylum seekers in Australia in recent years, with the Australian Government continuing to enforce a very hardline stance on asylum seekers who arrive to Australia by boat. This is incorrect; compared to other OECD countries, Australia receives comparatively small numbers of asylum seekers, with the vast majority of the world’s refugees residing in developing countries (United Nations Higher Commissioner for Refugees, 2013) Another common false belief is that asylum seekers who arrive by boat are ‘illegal’. Asylum seekers are considered as ‘undocumented immigrants’; they have no access to basic human rights such as work rights, education, or healthcare, and are constantly vulnerable to being arrested and indefinitely detained by authorities (Mathew & Harley, 2014) Such false beliefs continue to be a common fixture in the discourse surrounding asylum seekers (McKay, Thomas, & Kneebone, 2012; Sulaiman-Hill, Thompson, Afsar, & Hodliffe, 2011). In another study, Lawson and Strange (2015) investigated memory distortions in the media and found that the lower the accuracy, the higher the level of confidence

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Conclusion