Researchers have tested ways to reduce the collective blaming of Muslims for extremism

By Emma Young Terror attacks by Muslim extremists tend to provoke hate crimes in response. After the London Bridge and Borough market attacks in 2017, and the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, for example, there was a spike in the number of reports of verbal and physical attacks on innocent Muslims. Two weeks after the London Bridge attacks, a British non-Muslim man even drove his van into worshippers leaving the Finsbury Park Mosque in London, killing one and injuring 11. “People have a tendency to hold groups collectively responsible for the actions of individual group members, which justifies ‘vicarious retribution’ against any group member to exact revenge,” note the authors of a new paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that explores how to short-circuit this cycle of violence. In what the researchers dub an “interventions tournament”, they tried out various methods of reducing the collective blaming of all Muslims for attacks by individual extremists. Most failed. But there was one clear winner: an intervention that encouraged non-Muslims to see the hypocrisy in blaming all Muslims for the appalling actions of a few individuals, but not all Christians for the violent actions of an extremist few. Emily Bruneau at the University of Pennsylvania led the work, beginning with a study of the importance of collective blaming, involving 193 mostly white, Christian Americans, recruited online. As they predicted, the researchers found that those partici...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Religion Social Terrorism Source Type: blogs