Intergroup Interaction and Attitudes to Migrants
In a preregistered randomized experiment, we test the impact of interaction with migrants on host community members’ attitudes toward migrants. In three treatments, host community members were paired with a migrant from a nearby refugee camp to play an incentivized guessing game. The game was neutral in content in the first treatment, introduced cues to economic matters in the second, and introduced cues to identity in the third. A fourth treatment paired host community members with other hosts. In the control condition, hosts did not interact with anyone. The results show that interaction with a migrant significantly improved attitudes toward them compared to no interaction. Economic or identity cues did not diminish this effect. However, we see similar effects on attitudes to migrants in the treatment where hosts interacted with other hosts, suggesting that the effects are driven by human interaction in general, rather than by interacting specifically with a migrant.
https://doi.org/10.1086/730740
