Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, anti-Muslim sentiment has been growing across the United States and Europe, with collective blame to all Muslims metered out in response to terrorist attacks perpetrated by religious extremists in a way that doesn’t happen for white Christians.
New research from Northwestern University attempted to understand why this was, and whether it could be altered. The researchers found that a relatively straightforward, one-minute intervention was capable of reducing this anti-Muslim bias almost straight away. What’s more, this reduction appeared to endure, as it persisted even when the participants were tested again a year later.
“The human brain has a set of biases, and many of these biases lie across in-group and out-group lines. If you see another group as an out-group, you judge them differently than you do your own,” the authors say. “Here we wanted to look at the tendency for Europeans to blame all Muslims for an act of violence committed by an individual Muslim extremist, but to not blame all white Europeans for an act of extremism committed by a white European.”
Reducing Islamophobia
The researchers focused their efforts on Spain, where anti-Muslim sentiment was poor after terrorist incidents in 2004 and 2017. Participants (who were all white) were presented with a 100-point scale, whereby 0 indicated that they didn’t place any blame on the collective group in question, up to 100 whereby all of the blame was placed on that group.
The volunteers were engaged at the start of the research, again 30 days later, and a third time a year after the initial contact. A control group were asked to rate on the 100-point scale how much blame they placed on Muslims for terrorist acts by Muslims. The typical score across all three engagements was 40.
The experimental group however were given an intervention called the ‘Collective Blame Hypocrisy’ intervention. This involved reading three descriptions of violence undertaken by white Europeans, before the volunteers were asked how responsible they personally felt for those attacks.
This was followed with text describing the 2015 attack by Islamic State in Paris, which contained a biography of a Muslim woman who owned a bakery in the area attacked. The volunteers were asked how responsible Fatima, and others like her, were for the violence in the city.
Amazingly, those who had undergone this simple intervention averaged just 10 points on the scale, or a fourfold difference over the control group. That these differences largely endured a year out suggests they made a lasting change in the mindsets of volunteers.
“A one-minute, logical activity shook the collective blame of Muslims enough that anti-Muslim sentiments were less than the control group a full year later,” the researchers say.
