Simple “Hypocrisy Intervention” Reduces Collective Blaming Of Muslims For Extremism, With Long-Lasting Effects

A rally in Melbourne against racism and Islamophobia following the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings. Credit: Scott Barbour/Getty Images By Emily Reynolds Log on to Twitter, open a newspaper or turn on the news and you’ll soon see just how prevalent anti-Muslim sentiment is, as well as how likely collective blame is to be placed on the group as a whole for actions perpetrated by a few Islamic extremists. Though American mass shootings are far more likely to be perpetrated by white men than Muslims, collective blame is rarely assigned to that group — instead, they are characterised as “lone wolves”, even when they explicitly belong to or espouse the views of neo-Nazi, white supremacist or misogynistic hate groups. But now, Emile Bruneau, director of the Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues have designed a simple intervention to reduce anti-Muslim sentiment — and both a month and a year on, the effect seems to have held. In their new paper, published in Nature Human Behaviour, the team asked white, Spanish participants to rate on a 100-point scale how much they blamed Muslims for individual acts of violence perpetrated by extremists (specifically, the bombing of Brussels airport in 2016); 0 indicating they placed no blame on the collective group, and 100 indicating complete blame. Anti-Muslim sentiments were also measured, by gauging participants’ agreement with statements like “We should dramatically decrease the...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Terrorism Source Type: blogs