🔎 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.
