The effects of refugees’ emotional tears on felt emotions and helping behaviors

Tearful faces are frequent in mass media portraits of refugees, but the consequences of such depictions for different kinds of intergroup helping remain poorly understood. While existing research suggests that individuals tend to be more willing to support those who display tears, the impact of emotional tears on tangible helping behavior, such as monetary donations, has not been examined. Understanding these dynamics could have significant implications for fundraising strategies employed by civil society organizations. Across three experiments relying on nation-wide panel data (N = 2647) and a quasi-experimental citizen science study (N = 191) conducted in the Netherlands, we tested the effects of refugees’ tearful (vs. non-tearful) expressions on people’s emotional reactions, intentions to offer refugees both dependency- and autonomy-oriented help, as well as actual helping behavior (i.e., money donated to an organization supporting refugees). Data from three online experiments unveiled a positive relationship between exposure to emotional tears and both dependency- and autonomy-oriented intentions to help, as well as donation behavior (in Study 4, two initiatives encompassing both dependency- and autonomy-oriented help), via felt compassion. Across all studies, the visual representations of refugees with tears consistently resulted in more helping intentions and donations indirectly via the perceived sadness of the refugee(s) and the subsequent felt compassion. Our findings illuminate critical questions regarding visual representations of refugees that might motivate solidarity. They also encourage future collaborative research at the convergence of art, social and emotion science, and activism. Our research also provides a platform for initiating fundraising campaigns aimed at generating resources to support initiatives focused on sharing the narratives of displaced individuals and empowering the refugee community.