Threat, Empathy, and Acceptance of Forcibly Displaced Persons

• In Event: Building Peace and Reducing Violence

Abstract

Durable settlement of conflicts depends on the safe, voluntary, and dignified return of displaced persons to their areas of origin or their resettlement elsewhere. Successful return or resettlement, in turn, depends on citizens’ willingness to host and integrate the displaced into their community. What factors lead individuals to accept displaced persons?

One important answer is altruism born of suffering. Individuals who have suffered war exposure and trauma have more empathy towards, and are more willing to host, displaced persons (Hartman, Morse, & Weber, 2021). This altruism extends to some, but not all, outgroups. We lack a good explanation of this difference. Prior research has speculated, but not established, that citizens are less accepting of individuals from outgroups that have perpetrated violence against their ingroup.

This suggests that acceptance of displaced persons is influenced by perception of threat. We use a threat management theory as our starting point. According to this theory, "primordial" categories of social perception provide information about the potential costs and benefits of social interaction. This suggests that experience of war violence calibrates threat sensitivity; those exposed to greater violence, and especially those suffering psychological distress, are more sensitive to threat cues. We hypothesize that respondents are more willing to host ethnic ingroup members, women, elderly, and married displaced persons compared to outgroup, men, young and single displaced persons. This tendency should be amplified among victims of war violence.

We assess these hypotheses with a conjoint survey experiment in areas of Nigeria to which internally displaced persons seek to move. Our design allows us not only to disentangle these social characteristics of the target of potential hosting behavior, but also to examine the role of perceived threat and feelings of empathy. The findings have important implications for understanding how citizens balance more self-regarding and other-regarding feelings towards displaced persons.

Authors

• James Walsh, National Science Foundation/UNC Charlotte

• Peter Onah Thompson, Appalachian State University

• Jonathan Hall, Uppsala University