Abstract
This study examines why negative attitudes toward refugees remain pervasive in South Korea despite minimal direct contact. While prior research highlights economic, security, and cultural threats as key drivers of anti‐refugee sentiment, our analysis of the 2024 Public Perception Survey on Refugees shows that those conventional explanations do not hold. Objective information and subjective perception about refugees have no measurable effect, and, even more surprisingly, interest in refugee issues explains more negative attitudes, contrary to the usual “more knowledge, more sympathy” expectation. Moreover, this negative effect of interest is amplified by strong ethnic identity, whereas civic identity play no significant role. These findings suggest that simply supplying facts or running superficial campaigns to generate interest is insufficient. What matters is the quality of that engagement. To foster genuine inclusion, long‐term strategies must move beyond cosmetic outreach and instead cultivate empathetic, critically reflective forms of public interest that can overcome entrenched biases and reshape attitudes toward refugees.