Recent protests at asylum hotels in Epping, Essex, have prompted calls from the hotel’s residents for something rare in UK migration debates: understanding. This is something that has been clearly lacking in the conversations fuelling anti-immigrant protests, from Southport in summer 2024 to Ballymena in Northern Ireland and Essex this year.

Protesters denounce asylum seekers as “criminals”, while authorities dismiss protests as “mindless violence” and “thuggery”. These labels stick because neither side really understands the other.

Our recent study illustrates this, showing how far imagination outruns knowledge when it comes to migration. People tend to overestimate refugees’ negative feelings and underestimate their positive feelings.

We asked Britons what they thought Syrian refugees in the UK felt. But only 15% of Britons guessed that “hopeful” – not “afraid”, “desperate” or “angry” – was their most commonly reported emotion.

That mismatch between reality and perception is what researchers call an “empathy gap”: our inability to accurately recognise the emotions of people outside our own group. This gap is where fear and misinformation can take hold. But a new way of thinking about empathy could help close it.

The trouble with empathy

Empathy is often celebrated in liberal democracies as vital towards peaceful coexistence between groups, critical to democratic functioning and conflict resolution.

Evidence suggests that empathy can promote more inclusive behaviour toward refugees by making citizens more aware of refugees’ experiences. Similarly, training that emphasises the importance of empathy in police officers has been shown to reduce the risk of confrontation between protesters and officers.

Empathy research often asks people to imagine another’s feelings and then rate their own level of concern. However, self-reported empathy measures are prone to socially desirable responding and gender biases. They also assume we know what “others” feel without ever checking with them. This means that what we record as “empathy” may, in fact, be inaccurate guesswork – filtered through our own biases – rather than a genuine understanding of the other’s reality.

How can we be sure that the version of the world we see through another’s eyes is valid, if we haven’t asked the “other” in the first place how they see the world?

Instead, we propose the concept of “intersubjective empathy”. This approach is about accurately recognising how others feel, as reported by them. It is a cognitive ability, not a moral badge, necessitating that we first ask others what they feel, rather than assume it.

This boils the empathy exercise down to just two short questions: The out-group is asked: “How do you feel?” The in-group is asked separately: “How do you think the out-group feels?” Comparing these responses gives us a similarity score – our measure of empathic accuracy.

We surveyed 1,534 British citizens and 484 young Syrian refugees (aged 18-32) in 2017, shortly after the Brexit referendum and the peak of Europe’s refugee crisis.

The results showed that British citizens significantly underestimated the positive emotions refugees reported – especially happiness and hope – and overestimated their negative emotions.

Is this really a problem, you might ask? Surely it’s enough to feel that someone is going through a difficult time? But this paternalistic empathy – imagining a group as being worse off than they are – can produce negative stereotypes of the pitied group and be deeply disempowering. Accurate emotion recognition is important.

Our analysis shows that intersubjective empathy can indeed help dispel public fears over immigration. We found that people with higher levels of intersubjective empathy (greater understanding of the other group’s emotions) were not only less likely to see refugees as threatening, but also more likely to be motivated to care for them.

But empathy, even the accurate kind, has limits. At very high levels of empathic accuracy (high intersubjective empathy), support for helping refugees actually declined. Why? One possibility is that people concluded refugees were coping well and didn’t need help. Another is that high empathy triggered a sense of competition or resentment – perceiving refugee wellbeing as coming at the expense of one’s own group.

While the belief that refugees are benefiting while locals lose out does appear in the current protests, we know that this can be fuelled by misinformation, partial truths or far right ideology, not understanding. Intersubjective empathy means recognising a group’s complex and diverse realities, without reducing refugees to either helpless victims or undeserving beneficiaries.

Us v them

In a polarised society, empathy must go beyond imagining suffering and recognise people’s real experiences. That includes recognising refugees not just as victims, but as people with resilience, agency and emotional complexity. This should involve amplifying refugee voices and agency in all their diversity.

But it also means listening to those who express fear or anger about immigration, without rushing to moral judgement. Automatically branding protesters as racist or far-right thugs, without seeking to recognise their emotions, may only shift the divide from “citizens v migrants” to “good v bad citizens”.

If we want to move beyond the current (and seemingly permanent) conflicts around migration, we need tools that help reduce fear without scapegoating anyone. Intersubjective empathy is one such tool, usable in schools, policy and community work. Sometimes, the most important thing we can do isn’t feel for others, but to truly hear and understand them.

Georgios Karyotis, Professor of Security Politics, University of Glasgow; Andrew McNeill, Lecturer, School of Psychology, Queen's University Belfast, and Dimitris Skleparis, Senior Lecturer in the Politics of Security, Newcastle University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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