Prejudice towards Syrian refugees in Turkey from a multilevel approach: The effects of empathy and threat in particular contexts

To understand the current and future processes in the issue of Syrian refugees, scrutinizing the relations between refugees and the local community is a quite crucial subject. The present research provides two experimental analyses regarding the roles of empathy and perceived threat in the levels of prejudice toward Syrian refugees in Turkey. In this regard, the objective of the current study is twofold. First is to uncover whether the level of prejudice changes across different experimental conditions, in which empathy- or threat-evoking situations are presented. The second is to observe whether the influences of the empathy and perceived threat on levels of prejudice vary when Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and the influences of contexts are also taken into account. The contexts were designated according to the proportion of refugees to the populations in different cities. By utilizing a multilevel approach as a framework, the individual, situational and contextual factors were combined and elaborated. The results revealed that while in the context of largest cities people were more vulnerable to being empathetic to Syrian refugees, the ones in the border district were affected by threat. The findings also yielded that when RWA and SDO were involved in the model, they did not appear as the significant predictors of prejudice in the context of border cities. However, both were observed as the substantial predictors along with empathy, in the largest cities. The research produced noteworthy implications, especially displaying the significance of the multilevel approach in such a multifaceted phenomenon.