Visual Portrayals of People in Need: The Impact of Refugee Depictions on Compassion and Support for Humanitarian Aid
As conflicts flare around the world, images of refugees are a familiar presence in Western media. Drawing on existing accounts of refugee imagery, and on previous research on compassion and on Moral Foundations Theory, we demonstrate how refugee depictions that vary in terms of their sympathy framing influence public opinion, using three survey experiments in Sweden, the US, and UK, with 25 unique images taken from international media coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis and over 4,500 combined respondents. We find that ideology has a strong moderating effect on the impact of refugee visual imagery: whereas liberals are similarly sympathetic to refugee depictions, irrespective of the manifest vulnerability of those depicted or how they are pictured, compassion responses among conservatives vary with the specific visual frame presented. Moreover, compassion mediates the effect of visuals on right-wing support for refugee aid, particularly when conservatives are shown images of individual children refugees as opposed to images of groups of adults. We conclude by discussing the implications for the editorial selection of news photographs of refugees, as well as the need for further research into the role of images in shaping responses to humanitarian crises across different cultural contexts.