(Un)Veiling Our Biases: Activating Religious, Emotional, and Contextual Cues in News Media Representations of Syrian Refugees

Authors

  • Laura P. B. Partain Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Andrew J. Weaver Indiana University-Bloomington

Keywords:

Syrian refugees, religion, media effects, ethnic stereotypes, priming

Abstract

This experiment tests visual and textual cue effects on U.S. participants’ reactions to news media representations of Syrian refugees desiring resettlement in the United States during the 2016 presidential election cycle. Undergraduates from a large Midwestern university participated in this online experiment in April 2016. We analyzed participants’ extant biases and stereotypes toward Syrian refugee and Muslim communities and measured their emotional responses, feelings of threat, and attitudinal feedback. Our research shows that participants were less emotionally and attitudinally sympathetic and felt higher levels of threat toward Syrian refugees when receiving the visual manipulation with hijab. Additionally, our findings show that participants’ religious identification significantly influences responses to Syrian refugees and that visual representations of Syrian refugees with intensified facial emotions, such as despair and sadness, amplified participants’ varying feelings of perceived threat.

Author Biographies

Laura P. B. Partain, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Laura Partain is a MIT lecturer in Civic and Global Media researching Middle Eastern communities—Syrians, Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians—in the Middle East and those living in diaspora. Interrogating ideological messaging strategies in US news and social media, as well as those used in forced migrant self-representations, she takes a media effects approach to analyzing intersections of racial, religious, and ethnic identities at the site of national belonging.

Andrew J. Weaver, Indiana University-Bloomington

Andrew Weaver is an Associate Professor in the Media School at Indiana University-Bloomington. His program of research could broadly be described as media psychology. That is, he is interested in why people consume certain types of content and how this content affects them and his work is informed by what we know about mental processes. He has research projects currently in progress in three focus areas: Media Violence, Moral Choices in Video Games, and Race and Selective Exposure.

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Published

2022-04-24

Issue

Section

Articles