Countering Misperceptions to Reduce Prejudice: An Experiment on Attitudes toward Muslim Americans

Abstract

Muslim Americans constitute one of the United States’ most vulnerable minority groups, facing frequent discrimination from both the public and the government. Despite this vulnerability, few studies evaluate interventions for reducing prejudice against Muslim Americans. Building from an insightful literature on the sources of prejudice against Muslim Americans, this paper tests whether attitudes can be improved with information countering misperceptions of the community as particularly foreign, threatening, and disloyal to the United States. The experimental treatment modestly improved attitudes, including among some subgroups predisposed to prejudice against Muslim Americans. However, the treatment struggled to change policy views, and it demonstrated some vulnerability to social desirability bias and priming on terrorism threats. The findings suggest that information campaigns addressing misperceptions can help to reduce prejudice on the margins, but primarily in less politicized contexts.

Assessing the Effect of Media Tone on Attitudes Toward Muslims: Evidence From an Online Experiment

“…To address these limitations, we utilize a dataset of newspaper articles that provides precise estimates of the scale of article valence and examine the effect of exposure to negative, neutral, and positive articles about both a stigmatized and non-stigmatized group. Given the potential distinctiveness of responses to Muslims—especially the stickiness of negative attitudes toward Muslims (Lajevardi and Oskooii 2018) and the uncertainties surrounding the effects of positive representations (Saleem et al 2017; Williamson 2020; Lajevardi 2021)—we introduce Catholics as a comparison group. As noted above, Catholics are a non-majority religious group in American society that is arguably as different from Muslims as possible.…”

“…In addition, we show that while the effect of negative news about the two groups is similar, positive news increases attitudes much less for participants treated with news about Muslims. Our study thus uses actual newspaper articles and a novel experimental design to contribute to scholarship examining the effects of counterstereotypic or positive representations of Muslims (Saleem et al 2017;Lajevardi 2020Lajevardi , 2021Williamson 2020).…”

In Someone Else's Shoes: Promoting Prosocial Behavior Through Perspective Taking

“…Although information provision tends to update beliefs, these interventions have had mixed success in shifting (political) attitudes (8,9,10,29,30), perhaps because individuals tend to engage in motivated reasoning [31]. A second body of research, recognizing the limitations of information provision, has instead leveraged emotional states to influence attitudes through perspective-taking exercises or games and through drawing parallels with personal experiences.…”

Evaluating Muslim American Representation

“…There is growing concern about the status of Muslims in the United States today. Anti-Muslim attitudes are pervasive (Kalkan, Layman, and Uslaner 2009; Oskooii, Dana, and Barreto 2019; Panagopoulos 2006; Williamson 2019) and matter for shaping candidate (Kalkan, Layman, and Green 2018; Lajevardi and Abrajano 2019) and policy support (Dunwoody and McFarland 2018; Lajevardi and Oskooii 2018). The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that both anti-Muslim hate crimes and hate groups soared in response to the 2016 presidential campaign: in 2017, anti-Muslim hate groups grew for the third straight year to 114 chapters, and hate crimes increased by at least 19% from the previous year 1…”