Framing Rohingya as Allies Boosts Trust and Citizenship Support After Myanmar Coup

🔎 The Question

Can exclusionary outgroup attitudes improve under repression? Existing literature emphasizes that shared victimization can blur identity boundaries and reduce prejudice. This study proposes an alternative pathway: attitudes shift when individuals perceive an outgroup as contributing to a shared goal. This is framed as an instrumental cognitive update rather than an identity-based recategorization.

🧭 What Was Tested

A web-based survey experiment conducted in post-coup Myanmar examines whether framing the Rohingya as contributors to a collective objective changes majority attitudes toward them. The Rohingya are treated in the study as a severely marginalized outgroup whose social and political status is highly contested.

🧪 How the Evidence Was Collected

• A web-based survey experiment implemented in Myanmar after the coup served as the empirical test.
• Attitudinal measures focused on trust and support for Rohingya citizenship rights.
• Experimental treatments framed the Rohingya either as contributing to a shared goal or did not include that framing.

📌 Key Findings

• Trust in the Rohingya and support for their citizenship rights increase when the Rohingya are presented as contributing to a shared goal.
• The observed attitude shifts appear driven primarily by respondents who have more at stake in overthrowing the coup regime; those with less at stake show smaller or no effects.
• These patterns support an instrumental account—people update outgroup attitudes in light of perceived shared interests—distinct from the shared-victimization/recategorization mechanism emphasized in prior work.

💡 Why It Matters

The findings show that under repression, political framing that emphasizes instrumental cooperation can reduce exclusionary attitudes toward a marginalized outgroup. This suggests new avenues for understanding attitude change in repressive contexts and for designing political messages and alliances that may alleviate intergroup exclusion.