Border walls are one of the more visceral demonstrations of the boundaries we place between us as human beings.  For some, they’re perceived as a barrier to mobility and freedom, while for others they’re viewed as a crucial tool for ensuring safety and security.

Regardless of one’s opinion of border walls, what does appear universal is the strong feelings they invoke.  Research from the University of Pennsylvania explores how people perceive and regard border walls and whether they have a universal meaning across nationalities.

Distance and separation

The researchers designed an experiment to understand how border walls influence the way we view and regard foreign countries.  They designed the experiment in a way to try and avoid the highly polarized and politicized feelings any particular border policies in their country may invoke.

“It struck us both as intuitive and consistent with a lot of psychological research that walls connote unfriendliness, a desire to be separate from what is on the other side,” they explain. “We thought the best way to untangle politics from perceptions would be to design an experiment that forces respondents to think beyond their own political context.”

The research found that the presence of border walls tended to lower the opinion people had of bordering countries, with a suggestion that international relationships are hostile rather than benevolent.  These persistent negative impressions people have of neighboring countries behind border infrastructure have obvious policy implications and demonstrate the impact border security policies have on the soft power of any country.

Forming an opinion

The researchers collated footage from the internet on Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, which were chosen on the basis that the volunteers probably know little about either country and therefore they would not have any preconceived prejudices about them prior to the experiment.

They then developed a short documentary about the culture and history of Tajikistan, with participants shown one of three versions of this film before being asked to rate their impression of both it and neighboring Kyrgyzstan.  In one version of the documentary, the narrator explicitly mentions the border between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in the context of a valley between two mountains.  In the second version, the border is referenced in terms of a border wall, while the third also references the wall but adds that it was Kyrgyzstan that originally built it.

The experiment unfolded in three countries, each with very different recent experiences of border infrastructure, whether the United States’ controversial border wall with Mexico, the border on the island of Ireland that was dismantled in the 1990s, and the Turkish border with war-torn Syria, which has largely been sealed off.

As well as the negative perceptions that emerged of countries with physical border walls, the results also showed that there was a particularly harsh opinion of the government responsible for building the wall in the first place.  Interestingly, while the erection of a wall did improve perceptions of the border security of a country, it nonetheless made people who lived there feel less safe.  These responses were consistent regardless of the politics of the individuals, their country, or indeed their location in relation to the border in question.

“People in Ireland, the U.S., and Turkey all responded in the same way to the presence of a wall, and they all held the country that built it in lower esteem,” the researchers explain. “We had assumed that those who favored walls in their own domestic political context would be less likely to draw these same inferences. That’s not at all what we found.”

The researchers don’t go as far as to suggest that border walls serve no purpose at all, merely that they should be fully aware of the implications, especially in terms of the soft attributes that are affected by the process.

“It is important to appreciate the possibility that some symbolic security measures—of which walling may be one—may reduce a state’s attractiveness more than they enhance national security,” they conclude.