The effect of intergroup threat and empathy on explicit and implicit attitudes toward Syrian immigrants

Inflated numbers of Syrian refugees in Turkey leaded to a stable interaction between Turkish citizens and Syrian refugees, therefore that attitudes towards Syrian refugees in Turkey has become more critical to study. Intergroup threat is experienced when members of one group perceive that another group is in a position to cause them harm.The concept of empathy, which plays a crucial role in the attitudes toward out group, is generally defined as the ability to recognize and share another person's feelings and truly understand what the person has going through. Consistent with the literature, it was thought that intergroup threat and empathy affect both the explicit and implicit attitudes toward Syrian refugees. The effect of intergroup threat and empathy on explicit attitudes towards Syrian refugees was investigated in the first experiment carried out in the study. On the other hand, the second experiment was conducted to investigate implicit attitudes toward Syrian refugees in relation with the concepts stated below. In both experiments, empathy was manipulated by using the perspective taking method. Thus, participants were divided into two groups (high threat/low threat), then participants in high empathy condition were shown a video containing an interview with Syrian refugees while participants in the low empathy condition were shown a video related to "space-time". The findings indicated that both explicit and implicit attitudes were more negative when participants are high in intergroup threat. Additionally, it has been observed that at both levels of intergroup threat, participants who put themselves in refugees' shoes had more positive explicit and implicit attitudes.