Personality and attitudes towards refugees: evidence from Canada

ABSTRACT

As countries around the globe struggle to find appropriate solutions to the growing migration and refugee crisis, it is essential to better understand attitudes towards refugees. This article explores whether individual differences in personality can help explain anti refugee sentiments. The article takes an expansive approach, integrating both general personality traits (honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness) as well as the Dark Triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) into the analysis. While a large literature has explored the relationship between personality and prejudice generally, much less work has studied specific outgroups like refugees. Drawing on survey data from a representative sample of 2,500 Canadians the results reveal the importance of personality for understanding prejudicial attitudes towards refugees, and highlight the importance of studying both general and dark personality traits.

KEYWORDS:

• Personality
• Dark Triad
• HEXACO
• Refugees
• Prejudice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For context, the United States admitted 23,000 refugees in 2018 – some 5,000 less than Canada. Admission rates are down considerably from 2016 when Canada admitted 47,000 refugees and the US 97,000.

2 This may be especially the case for those claiming asylum where there might be negative perceptions of ‘que-jumping’.

3 A 2016 survey revealed that of those who opposed increased resettlement of Syrian refugees, 46% were concerned about terrorism (Telhami and Telhami 2016).

4 While online non-probability samples have a number of potential limitations (including concerns about sample representativeness, respondent fatigue, and data quality), recent studies highlight the benefits of online surveys and suggest that some concerns may be overstated (Stephenson and Crête 2011; Breton et al. 2017).

5 Note that when discussing these darker personality traits, we are doing so in a subclinical way. Hare (1991), for example, demonstrates that psychopathy can have meaningful variation within normal populations.

6 All personality variables were standardized using the ‘Percent of Maximum Possible (POMP)’ method to allow for easy comparison (see Cohen et al. 1999).

7 While multicollinearity is a possibility, all VIF-scores are less than 2 and therefore within the recommended acceptable range.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.