I am interested in understanding the determinants of intergroup threat and essentialist attitudes, and how to reduce prejudice and discrimination against refugees and immigrants. I have three projects in this area.
Project 1: Prejudice Against Refugees and Social Cohesion
I am interested in improving social cohesion in immigrant/refugee-receiving societies. In my current project at Georgetown, I work on the changes in intergroup relations between the Syrian refugees and host society members in Turkey, after the massive and devastating earthquake that occurred in February 2023. We are now fielding surveys to gauge the current sentiments and attitudes of both groups.
In my previous projects, I utilized two strategies recognized as effective to reduce prejudice in Western contexts: perspective-taking(PT), actively considering the experiences of others, and intergroup contact. While there are many promising findings of PT, studies in psychology have also shown that PT interventions can be ineffective or harmful among people who identify strongly with the ingroup or under conditions of intense intergroup competition. The fact that PT interventions sometimes produce the desired bias-reducing effects while other times they backfire and increase conflict suggests that the underlying context conditions the effects of these interventions.
With Dr. Sambanis, we take a set of established PT techniques tested in developed countries and use them in the Global South so as to push the literature in the direction of exploring scope conditions for the application of PT interventions. In our first study, we examined whether reminding people of the displacement history of their ancestors (salience prime) can improve their attitudes towards the Syrian refugees. Salience prime is found to be effective in studies conducted in the US, Greece, and Germany. In the 2021 and 2022, we ran survey experiments in Turkey and Cyprus and found that salience prime does not produce any significant changes in people’s attitudes and even backfires on people with a history of displacement. This shows the limits of light-touch cognitive interventions in scalability. The paper is accepted at the Journal of Politics. I continue to work on strategies that can effectively reduce prejudice against refugees in difficult contexts that are fraught with economic struggles and have had a big influx of newcomers.
In the area of refugee integration, I examined the effect of contact on threat perceptions. Most of the contact literature focuses on contact with positive valence and high intensity, such as intimate forms of contact as observed in the case of friendship. However, the most ubiquitous form of intergroup contact is actually casual, i.e., not involving close relationships, particularly in immigrant-receiving countries. I define casual contact as involuntary and undirected contact that does not involve close relationships, such as encounters while shopping at a store, walking on a crowded street, or riding a bus. Especially in the wake of the Syrian humanitarian crisis, contact between the Syrian immigrants and the locals can hardly go beyond casual due to linguistic differences, unless the languages popular in Syria are widely spoken in the receiving country. How does then casual contact between an ethnically different host society and immigrant/refugee groups affect threat perceptions? Studying the attitudes toward Syrian immigrants in Turkey, with my co-author, we find that everyday casual contact is associated with higher threat perceptions. While not dismissing possible positive effects of contact on attitudes toward outgroups, we argue that a high level of casual contact is harmful for intergroup relationships, as it is likely to reinforce stereotypical beliefs and increase threat perceptions. Our analysis opens the possibility that what is conventionally understood as the negative effect of contextual diversity, i.e., the mere presence of an outgroup, may indeed come from the negative effect of casual contact on intergroup perceptions. The paper is published at the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies.
Project 2: Genetic Ancestry Tests, Ethnic Identification, and Racial Essentialism
This project is on changes in Americans’ racial and ethnic identities after taking genetic ancestry tests. I worked on this as a postdoctoral research fellow in the UBC Department of Sociology and produced three articles with my supervisor Dr. Wendy Roth. In the first article, which is published in Current Psychology, we develop a new scale to measure genetic essentialism for race using original survey data. I am the lead author in this article. The second article identifies the causal effect of genetic ancestry tests on essentialist views of race, using randomized controlled trial testing, and is published in PLOS One. For that article, I am the second lead author. The third article examines the causal effect of discovering ancestries on ethnic identification and argues that the aspirations of test-takers and their perceptions of other ethnic groups play a significant role in their decision to adopt a new identity. This paper is accepted at the American Journal of Sociology, and Dr. Roth and I contributed to it equally.
Project 3: Transformation of Ethnic Identity in Conflict
In this project, I examine how ethnic identity of Kurds became salient for some individuals and was suppressed/muted for others during the course of the civil war in Turkey between the Kurdish rebels and the Turkish state. In an article entitled, “Ethnic Identity Development in Wartime,” I unpack the mechanisms behind heightening salience of ethnic identity in separatist wars. This paper draws on qualitative interviews conducted during my dissertation fieldwork. My argument is that counterhegemonic discourse is most effective in socialization patterns of young adults who were born into the civil war period, moving ethnicity higher in the hierarchy of social identities. I presented the paper in workshops at UBC and at the conferences of the Association of National Identities, and Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism. This article is in preparation for submission.