Research has documented that perceived threats posed by refugees and immigrants shape responses toward these populations in (mostly Western) host societies. In this study, we tested whether realistic, symbolic, and collective psychological ownership threats are empirically distinct and whether they predict prejudice toward Syrian refugees and anti-refugee policy support in Türkiye, where anti-refugee public sentiment is quite strong. In addition, we considered the role of perceptions of the state’s treatment of refugees (i.e., as unfairly prioritizing the needs of the refugees at the expense of citizens) in shaping the responses of host nation members toward refugees. We collected data from 349 participants using university’s participant pool. We conducted confirmatory factor analysis to examine if realistic, symbolic, and collective psychological ownership threats are distinct constructs. The results supported this hypothesis. We conducted structural equation models where anti-refugee policy support related to three domains (acceptance and cultural integration of refugees, financial aids, political rights and citizenship), social distance, and negative attitudes were regressed on realistic, symbolic, collective psychological ownership threats, and perceived treatment of refugees by the state, along with control variables (intergroup contact, political ideology, and religiosity). The results have shown that realistic and symbolic threats positively predicted prejudice and anti-immigrant policy support whereas collective psychological ownership threat did not. Perceived treatment of refugees by the state predicted lower support for financial aid policies and greater social distance. Exploratory analyses suggested that perceptions regarding Syrian refugees spilled over to prejudice toward Afghan refugees. We discuss the implications of our findings for threat and relative deprivation theories as well as their applied implications for host societies.
Yakın et al. (Fri,) studied this question.