Abstract
Türkiye, the country hosting the most refugees in the world, hosted millions of refugees due to the Syrian civil war, the Taliban coup, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Among these communities, Syrian refugees are the majority in number and have been mainly influencing Türkiye’s agenda for the last decade. This unexpected and sudden contact elevated intergroup tension and conflict between host and Syrian refugee communities. We aimed to examine the association between multiculturalism, positive and negative emotions, perceived outgroup threat, social distance, and xenophobia toward refugees among non-WEIRD participants in the prejudice-intense intergroup context through two correlational studies (Ntotal = 898) to shed light on possible remedies for these conflicts. Study 1 revealed that multiculturalism negatively predicted social distance toward Syrian refugees. This association was mediated by positive and negative emotions. Study 2, which focused on xenophobia as an outcome, found that multiculturalism negatively predicted xenophobia, and positive and negative emotions had a mediator role on the association between these variables. We also found that participants with higher social distancing towards Syrian refugees had lower and poorer intergroup contact quality and perceived more outgroup threat than those with lower social distancing. The findings indicated that greater multiculturalism and positive emotions were associated with low social distance and xenophobia in the prejudice-intense context. We discussed the findings in terms of the potential benefits of multiculturalism and the positive emotions for attitudes towards refugees in prejudice-intense relationships between hosts and refugees.
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Data availability
The data, measurements and appendices are available at https://osf.io/n2ka5/?view_only=6372f51083064d46a55ce3adb10dda2b
Code availability
Analytical R codes are available from the corresponding author, upon request.
Notes
Here, we would like to remind that there are different conceptualizations of multiculturalism. For instance, some different researchers conceptualize this concept from a critical perspective in a different framework (see, Meer & Modood, 2012; Modood, 2013). In this study, we conceptualize multiculturalism as the equal living of different cultural groups in a society that attaches importance to diversity.
This wage shows that the participants have a household income equal to the average minimum wage for Türkiye.
To capture a narrative consistent with Study 2, we also conducted three independent samples t tests to see whether there were significant differences between social distance groups on the variables we focused on. However, since these analyzes were not within the scope of the research question of Study 1, we presented the results in Appendix II.
We focused on students because they were the most heterogeneous social group we could reach across the country.
Approximately 28% of the participants (N = 102) showed a mean of 1, which is the lowest mean, on the 7-point Likert-type social distance measurement in Study 1. Approximately 41% of the participants (N = 147) have a social distance of less than a mean of 3 towards Syrian refugees (see also, Appendix III).
All intergroup comparisons are presented in Appendix IV for a broader perspective. We did not present the relevant analysis result here, as it was out of the scope of the current study.
Separate analyzes for the group with low and high social distancing also point to the same pattern (see Appendix V).
Some comparisons violated the assumptions of normality or homogeneity of variances. Accordingly, the Mann-Whitney U tests we conducted pointed to a similar pattern (see Appendix VI) with the results of the independent sample t tests.
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We would like to thank Bilal Ul-Haque Farooqui, Lucas Austin Mcleod and Sara Teresa Pergola for helping us.
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Uygur, M.R., Eser, H.B., Çoksan, S. et al. Multiculturalism, social distance, and xenophobia among non-WEIRD individuals toward Syrian refugees: positive and negative emotions as moderators. Curr Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06001-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06001-9