Context

Worldwide, more than 60 million people are forced to stay abroad due to war or persecution in their home country. Many of them experience prejudice or mistrust and some outright hostility, which adds to the traumatic experience, which displaced them in the first place. A deeper understanding of attitudes towards refugees and ways in which positive links could be built between them and the local populations is of utmost importance.  

Goals and Methods

We conducted an online experiment with some 27,000 citizens of six EU member states. To inspect malleability of attitudes towards refugees, we tested two interventions. Participants in the Perspective Getting condition heard of experience of a specific refugee and briefly reported their reaction to it. Those in the Perspective Taking condition were asked to imagine and describe themselves as a refugee. These groups were compared to the control group with no intervention. Subsequently, we measured two simple proxies for attitudes and policy preferences: willingness to spend a moment to support refugees on social media (a real-effort task) and to opt for opening the labour market for the refugees (a declaration).  

Findings 

Both interventions had moderate (8-10%) but highly significant effects on both dependent variables. The direction was very robust, also across the two waves of the experiment (six months apart). The size of these effects, by contrast, varied considerably by country and other subjects characteristics, highlighting potential for targeted interventions. A full-scale report is coming later this year.