Can a Sense of Shared War Experience Increase Refugee Acceptance?

• In Event: Public Opinion About International Events and Organizations

Abstract

Can narratives that highlight a family history of war, and hence a shared war experience, increase people's openness towards refugees fleeing conflict and persecution today? On the one hand, personal war experience or stories of their parents' and ancestors' struggles during a war can be a gateway for understanding the plight of refugees, which could elicit greater empathic concern for them. On the other hand, shining a light on one's family history of war could foment higher levels of outgroup antipathy due to heightened feelings of threat that are concomitant with war experience. To understand the effects of these countervailing forces, we leverage the context of South Korea, a useful edge case given residents have experienced the devastation of war relatively recently, and yet now live in an advanced economy that attracts asylum seekers. Employing an original representative survey, we find that war experience translates to {\it less} openness to refugees, unless the experience included displacement. However, when the parallels between the human costs of the Korean War and current conflicts are highlighted, refugee acceptance increases among both those with and without direct war experience, particularly among those who were displaced by the war. Moreover, this strategy is more effective than a perspective-taking exercise that does not explicitly make one's family history salient, as well as messages that highlight how one's country is underperforming relative to other countries in terms of refugee acceptance or how the presence of refugees is economically beneficial. Our findings suggest that while past war experience does not necessarily translate to more amity towards refugees, invoking shared family experiences of war does reduce anti-refugee sentiment, especially among those with a family history of forced displacement.

Authors

• Christopher Paik, New York University Abu Dhabi

• Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, UC Berkeley

• Ji Yeon (Jean) Hong, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology