When Seeing Outgroup Members Suffering: Third Parties’ Reactions to the Foreign Peer Discriminatory Abuse

This research explores the dynamics between local workers and foreign migrants in Asia’s evolving labour markets. With recent migration flows from China and Southeast Asia rising—paralleling European trends—concerns about job competition, discrimination, and social integration have intensified. To address these issues, this study introduces the concept of foreign peer discriminatory abuse, where third-party employees witness discriminatory abuse by a shared supervisor targeting foreign coworkers. Diverging from prior research focused on strong negative emotions like anger or fear, this study emphasises compassion as a milder, positive emotional response. Drawing on the appraisal model of compassion, it hypothesises that foreign peer discriminatory abuse elicits both anger and compassion, with compassion motivating helping behaviours toward affected coworkers. Taiwan, with its significant migrant labour force and public debates on integration, serves as the study context. Using a two-phase, time-lagged survey of 149 working adults, results indicate that foreign peer discriminatory abuse positively predicts compassion, which in turn enhances helping behaviour even when accounting for anger. Compassion mediates the relationship between observed abuse and helping behaviour. From these findings, this study deepens the understanding of third-party responses to discriminatory mistreatment in diverse workplaces.