The Nature of Islamophobia: A Test of a Tripartite View in Five Countries

Abstract

This article provides an examination of the structure of Islamophobia across cultures. Our novel measure—the Tripartite Islamophobia Scale (TIS)—embeds three theoretically and statistically grounded subcomponents of Islamophobia: anti-Muslim prejudice, anti-Islamic sentiment, and conspiracy beliefs. Across six samples (i.e., India, Poland, Germany, France, and the United States), preregistered analyses corroborated that these three subcomponents are statistically distinct. Measurement invariance analyses indicated full scalar invariance, suggesting that the tripartite understanding of Islamophobia is generalizable across cultural contexts. Furthermore, the subcomponents were partially dissociated in terms of the intergroup emotions they are predicted by as well as the intergroup outcomes they predict (e.g., dehumanization, ethnic persecution). For example, intergroup anger and disgust underpin Islamophobic attitudes, over and above the impact of fear. Finally, our results show that social dominance orientation (SDO) and ingroup identification moderate intergroup emotions and Islamophobia. We address both theoretical implications for the nature of Islamophobia and practical interventions to reduce it.

Conspiracy theories as opportunistic attributions of power

“…The literature offers a few potential explanations. First, conspiracy stereotypes can be viewed as a subcomponent of various forms of prejudice (e.g., antisemitism [11,30]; islamophobia, [19]), and a core aspect of prejudice is to deny the existence of discrimination [40]. Thus, a first mechanism through which conspiracy believers may come to downplay the powerlessness of the outgroup may be simply to deny it.…”

“…For instance, as highlighted earlier, proponents of the great replacement conspiracy theory consider that the elites (i.e., the media, the government, intellectuals) are involved in the conspiracy [32]. In this regard, it is interesting that in research examining belief in conspiracy theories targeting Muslims, some measures include the involvement of authorities [38,41], while others do not [18,19]. Moreover, Muslim immigrants may be perceived as benefitting from the support of wealthy Muslim countries (e.g., Arab Emirates), or powerful Muslim organizations (e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood).…”

Disentangling national and religious identification as predictors of support for religious minority rights among Christian majority groups

“…Muslims experience greater resistance than other religious outgroups due to Islamophobia being currently more socially acceptable in receiving Western societies (Creighton & Jamal, 2015; Uenal et al., 2020). This tendency was partly confirmed since we found that diversity threat was more negatively associated with support for Muslims’ religious rights than with support for religious minority rights in general in Australia and Finland.…”

Awake together: Sociopsychological processes of engagement in conspiracist communities

“…Social identity motives [1][2][3]28], more than cognitive biases or personality factors as such, may become central to this next stage of the "spiritual journey". Social identity [i.e., 29] is indeed related to CTs that target hated outgroups [28, [30][31][32] or minorities [20,33].…”