Asylum seekers: How attributions and emotion affect Australians' views on mandatory detention of “the other”

There is little research regarding the social psychological processes shaping community opinions about asylum seeker policy. Here, we explored two issues by way of a random community survey of the Perth metropolitan area. We first examined whether the intergroup perceptions that occur when individuals focus upon the Australian community (self-focus) or asylum seekers themselves (other-focus) when evaluating the issue of asylum seekers in detention affected community opinions. Regarding self-focus, perceiving the Australian community as stable (not seeing asylum seekers as a threat to the stability of Australian society) predicted a more lenient policy orientation, as did perceiving the government's policy as illegitimate. Regarding other-focus, perceiving asylum seekers as legitimate, their situation in detention as unstable, and empathy predicted a more lenient policy orientation. Second, we examined the accuracy with which participants estimated wider community consensus for their respective policy orientation. As predicted, over-estimation increased as participants favoured tougher policy.