Fostering refugee receptivity through perspective taking: Evidence from Thailand

This paper investigates how perspective taking influences attitudes toward refugees in Thailand, a Global South country affected by Myanmar’s 2021 military coup and ensuing civil unrest. Despite Thailand’s long history of hosting refugees, public support for refugee reception remains underexplored. Drawing on a pre-registered survey experiment, we find that Thai participants who completed a simple perspective-taking exercise—imagining themselves as refugees—expressed significantly greater support for hosting Myanmar refugees and for Thailand signing the UN Refugee Convention. In contrast, treatments emphasizing financial burden-sharing, international reputation, or humanitarian sympathy had no discernible effect. A follow-up survey two months later suggests that the impact of perspective-taking may persist over time. These findings highlight the role of psychological mechanisms such as empathy in shaping attitudes toward refugees and offer insights into the potential for perspective-taking interventions in Southeast Asia and other Global South contexts.