While the Statue of Liberty invokes a welcoming and inclusive message towards migrants, the last few years have seen an overwhelmingly more hostile environment emerge. New research from the University of California San Diego highlights how much of this hostility is towards particular kinds of refugees.
The study reveals that of all the factors that underpin discrimination against refugees, religion is by far the most powerful. The researchers assessed discrimination across a range of metrics, from national origin, gender, English fluency, professional skill and age, and on a 7-point scale, Muslims scored noticeably lower, even when all other factors were identical.
What’s more, this apparent anti-Muslim bias was also prevalent across the United States, regardless of whether respondents were non-white, non-Christian or Democrats, suggesting this goes far beyond simply being a white, Christian, Republican issue.
That the study was conducted on the even of the 2016 presidential election signifies that the intolerant attitudes that Donald Trump inflamed during his campaign were perhaps already bubbling under, but the researchers believe they are only likely to be worse today after three years of his presidency.
Religious intolerance
The research, which saw around 1,800 American citizens quizzed on their views of Syrian refugees. The researchers focused on Syrians in large part because they wanted to ensure nationality remained constant, and therefore to focus on other characteristics.
They used conjoint analysis, which is a statistical technique commonly used in market research, whereby participants are shown pairs of refugee profiles that differ by things such as age, gender, religion, skill-level and fluency in English. They’re then asked to rate the refugees on a scale of 1-7, with 1 being that they definitely shouldn’t be admitted, up to 7, which suggests they definitely should.
The results suggest a clear penalty for being Muslim, but surprisingly, not necessarily for being a Muslim man.
“There is a penalty for being Muslim and a penalty for being male but not a separate special penalty for Muslim men,” the researchers explain.
Rather, the ‘male penalty’ applies regardless of the religion of the refugee, which the researchers suggest may be linked to any perceived security concerns associated with the refugee.
Overcoming the bias
So can this bias be overcome? New research from Northwestern University suggests it can be, and possibly in a straightforward manner.
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.”
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.
