The drowning-refugee effect: media salience and xenophobic attitudes

ABSTRACT

We study whether salient media coverage of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean affects individual xenophobic attitudes. We combine a randomized survey experiment – a variant of the classic ‘trolley dilemma’ – that implicitly elicits individual attitudes towards foreigners, with variation in interview timing, and find that such issue salience significantly decreases xenophobic attitudes by 2.2 percentage points. Our results thus support the idea that exposure to news describing immigrants as victims (instead of a threat) can significantly affect public opinion and mitigate bias against immigrants.

KEYWORDS:

• Media salience
• trolley problem
• xenophobia
• refugees
• attitudes towards immigration

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D72
• D83
• J61

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for comments provided by Marco Bertoni, Carl Bonander, Andreas Kotsadam, Sofia Jonsson, Enrico Rettore and seminar participants at FBK-IRVAPP and at the CEMIR seminar. We thank Deborah Willow for excellent editorial assistance and Stefanie Gäbler for outstanding research assistance. Part of this research was conducted while Niklas Jakobsson and Simone Schüller were visiting FBK-IRVAPP.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.