The Role of social dominance orientation, empathy and perceived threat in predicting prejudice of Turkish citizens toward Syrian immigrants

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2015
Karaoğlu, Ezgi
The aim of the current thesis is to investigate the impact of social dominance orientation (SDO), perceived threat, and empathy on prejudice toward Syrian immigrants in Turkey. Recently, with the increased number of Syrian immigrants entering Turkey by escaping the civil war in their country, the attitudes of the citizens of Turkey toward Syrian immigrants changed from positive into prejudicial ones. Under these changing circumstances, attitudes of citizens of Turkey toward Syrian immigrants were studied within the frameworks of empathy and two prejudice-explaining concepts: Social Dominance Orientation and Integrated Threat Theory. The prejudicial attitudes were conceptualized with social distance and negative affect. To investigate the effect of SDO, empathy and perceived threat on prejudice, multiple regression analyses and mediational analyses were conducted after collecting data from 592 individuals. As the SDO indicated two-factor solution, SDO-D (dominance) and SDO-E (egalitarianism), they were added separately to the analyses. After the analyses, social distance was predicted by SDO-E and general threat, negative threat was predicted by SDO-D, general threat and cultural difference threat, whereas positive affect was predicted by SDO-D, SDO-E, empathy, and general threat. Furthermore, cultural difference threat, significantly mediated the relation between SDO-D and negative affect; empathy, significantly mediated the relation between SDO-D, SDO-E, and positive affect and general threat significantly mediated the relation between SDO-D and positive affect. Additional analyses conducted for differentiating attitudes of the participants who contacted the Syrian immigrants (e.g., the ones worked with Syrian immigrants, the ones lived in populous cities in terms of Syrian immigrant population) underlied the Intergroup Contact Theory.

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Citation Formats
E. Karaoğlu, “The Role of social dominance orientation, empathy and perceived threat in predicting prejudice of Turkish citizens toward Syrian immigrants,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2015.