Not all negative: Macro justice principles predict positive attitudes towards asylum seekers in Australia

Abstract

Objective

Public opinion towards asylum seekers within Australia has become increasingly hostile over the past decade. In particular, such negative attitudes are associated with questioning the legitimacy of those who seek asylum and the fairness of granting their refugee status. The major aim of this paper is to test the role of macro and micro principles of social justice in predicting attitudes towards asylum seekers, beyond the established role of social dominance orientation (SDO) and right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA).

Method

A sample of 100 students (M_age = 22.83 years, SD_age = 8.26 years) responded to measures of macro and micro principles of social justice, SDO, RWA, and a measure of Attitudes Towards Asylum Seekers.

Results

Using multiple hierarchical regression analyses, we show that macro justice social principles (i.e., the belief in equal distribution of resources across a society) predict positive attitudes towards asylum seekers beyond the variation accounted for by SDO and RWA in predicting negative attitudes.

Conclusions

These results underscore the importance of taking into account individual orientations towards justice; we argue that these findings have important implications for the development of communication designed to reduce prejudice towards asylum seekers.

Key words:

• asylum seekers
• ATAS
• justice principles
• refugee
• social justice

Declaration of conflicting interests: We declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and /or publication of this article. This study was unfunded.

Declaration of conflicting interests: We declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and /or publication of this article. This study was unfunded.

Acknowledgements

This research was conceived during the Society of Australasian Social Psychologists PhD summer school 2012. The authors would like to thank their mentors from the summer school, Kelly Fielding and Heather Smith, for their guidance, enthusiasm, and contributions during the preliminary stages of this research.

Notes

Declaration of conflicting interests: We declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and /or publication of this article. This study was unfunded.

1. A natural log transformation was applied to the RWA scale. A single case exceeded 3 standard deviations (z = 3.59), and was replaced with $\bar{\mathrm{x}}+2\times \text{standard}\text{deviations}$(i.e., new value = 5.84; Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007). This replacement did not affect the results in any substantial manner. It is also worth reporting the restricted range in responses to the principles of micro justice scale (i.e., minimum $\bar{\mathrm{x}}=3.43$). Statistical analyses were performed on transformed data, but for the sake of interpretability the non‐transformed means and standard deviations are reported.

2. Assumptions were checked and one multivariate outlier was treated (replaced with $\bar{\mathrm{x}}+2\text{SD}$; Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007). There were some concerns regarding heteroscedastic variance in the residuals of the ATAS scale. Robust regression techniques were used to explore this violation (Wilcox, 2005, chapter 10), and further transformations of the raw data were applied (Field, 2009), but these did not affect the outcomes.