Although migrant categorizations (e.g. “migrants”, “refugees”) are often conflated in political and academic discourse, they may be ascribed to different people and inspire different preferences in public opinion. Previous research in Western Europe has identified more positive attitudes toward “refugees” than toward “migrants” due to the legitimate need for international protection of “real refugees” compared to the perceived illegitimate claims by “economic migrants”. However, little evidence suggests that the same preference also exists in Eastern European countries that have historically received smaller numbers of refugees and had fewer frequent experiences with migrants and foreigners compared to West European countries. Moreover, the term “refugee” was intensively recategorized as “bogus” and de-legitimized in East European political discourse. To provide new evidence, we conducted a pre-registered comparative survey-based study with a sample of young Slovak adults (N = 873) to compare evaluations of three commonly used migrant categorizations in Slovakia -- “refugees”, “migrants”, and “foreigners” -- on multiple attitudinal and behavioural measures. In addition, we also tested the intergroup contact hypothesis about the relationship between participants’ evaluations and their experiences of direct, extended, and mass-mediated contact with these target groups. We found that “refugees” invoked less favourable feelings, attitudes, trust, and greater social distance compared to “migrants” and “foreigners”. These evaluations related to the valence (and less to the quantity) of participants’ experience of intergroup contact. These results challenge previous findings about public opinion preferences for “refugees” over “migrants”, support the intergroup contact hypothesis, and make a case for a more contextualized research.

尽管移民类别（例如，“移民”，“难民”）通常在政治和学术话语中混为一谈，但它们可能归因于不同的人，并且激发了公众舆论的不同偏好。与对“经济移民”的非法主张相比，由于对国际保护“合法难民”的合法需要，西欧先前的研究已经确定了对“难民”比对“移民”更为积极的态度。但是，很少有证据表明，与西欧国家相比，东欧国家历史上接待的难民人数较少，与移民和外国人的往来经验较少，东欧国家也存在同样的偏好。此外，在东欧政治话语中，“难民”一词被强烈地归类为“伪造”，并被合法化。为了提供新的证据，我们对一个斯洛伐克年轻人（包括ñ= 873），以比较斯洛伐克在三种态度，行为方式上对三种常用移民类别（“难民”，“移民”和“外国人”）的评估。此外，我们还测试了关于参与者评估与他们与这些目标群体的直接，扩展和大规模介导接触经验之间关系的群体间接触假设。我们发现，与“移民”和“外国人”相比，“难民”所带来的感情，态度，信任和社交距离都更少。这些评估与参与者的小组间接触经验的效价（而不是数量）有关。这些结果挑战了先前关于“难民”胜于“移民”的舆论偏好的发现，支持群体间联系假设，