Implicit and Explicit Attitudes Towards Asylum Seekers in Australia: Demographic and Ideological Correlates

Abstract

Objective

Attitudes toward asylum seekers that have been reported in Australia are negative and pervasive. To date, this body of literature has explored only measured explicit responses. This article is the first to explore their implicit counterpart.

Method

Two cross‐sectional studies measured explicit and implicit attitudes towards asylum seekers. The first study used a community sample (N = 183, M _age = 24.98-years, 115 females), and the second used a sample of students (N = 106, M _age = 22.75-years, 87 female). The sample in Study 2 also responded to scales measuring levels of ideological orientations toward social dominance orientation (SDO), right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA), and principle of social justice.

Results

In Study 1, an exploration of demographic variables revealed that gender predicted explicit attitudes, but gender and religious affiliation predicted implicit attitudes. In Study 2, an exploration of ideological variables revealed that higher levels of SDO and RWA predict negative explicit attitudes, and macrojustice principles predict positive explicit attitudes, but only SDO predicts (negative) implicit attitudes.

Conclusions

The evidence presented reveals some discrepancies between factors that predict explicit and implicit attitudes toward this socially vulnerable group, and the findings are interpreted as evidence for a dual‐construct model of attitudes toward asylum seekers.

Key words:

• asylum seekers
• ATAS
• go/no‐go association task
• implicit attitudes
• refugee

Acknowledgements

The author thank Jodie Chapman and Prem Sebastian for their assistance with data collection. This research was conducted without financial grants or other funding. The author is affiliated with the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and Australian Catholic University.

Notes

1. A further 27 million remain displaced within their home countries; this group is referred to as internally displaced people.

2. Target category stimuli and distractors were piloted on a 5‐point Likert‐type scale ranging from 1 (does not represent asylum seekers) to 5 (completely represents asylum seekers) to ensure suitability (M _target = 4.83, SD = 0.39; M _distractor = 1.31, SD = 0.56; n = 23). Stimuli and pilot data are available from the primary author.

3. The scoring of the GNAT results in a higher score representing positive implicit attitudes, while the scoring of the ATAS results in a higher score representing negative explicit attitudes; paradoxically, a negative correlation represents findings that explicit and implicit attitudes are related in the same direction.

4. Effect size for multiple regressions in this article was calculated from the observed R ² using software by Soper (2015) based on the work of Cohen (1988).

5. In Study 2, at the request of the human research ethics committee, student participants were not asked about their ethnicity as this factor was deemed to be unrelated to the research question.

6. The residuals of the ATAS scale produced some heteroscedastic variance concerns. Following the protocol of Anderson et al. (2015), further transformation of the raw data and robust regression techniques were used to explore this violation (Wilcox, 2005), but these did not affect the outcomes.

7. Single sample t‐tests revealed that implicit attitudes differ significantly from 0 (Study 1: t(182) = −11.20, p < .001; Study 2: t(105) = −3.238, p = .002), justifying the label of negative attitudes; explicit attitudes did not differ significantly from the scale midpoint (Study 1: t(182) = −1.59, p = .112; Study 2: t(105) = −.69, p = .491), justifying the label of neutral attitudes.