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Religious Primes and Threat-Perceptions as Predictors of Attitudes toward Muslims in Israel

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Abstract

Three studies examined the influence of exposure to religious concepts on attitudes of Jews toward Muslims in Israel. Religious concepts were exposed by using either supraliminal (Study 1) or subliminal (Study 2) priming, hence tapping different levels of awareness. Comparable supraliminal and subliminal priming techniques were further employed to investigate the effects of participants’ own religious content (“Jewish”) and content representing the “other” religion (“Islamic”) on attitudes of Jewish participants toward members of the Muslim group (Study 3). Findings indicated that exposure to religious concepts at a conscious level increased threat perceptions and negative attitudes, while lack of awareness of religious concepts had positive outcomes. Additionally, realistic and symbolic threats played a mediating role in understanding the impact of Jewish concepts on perceived social distance only under conditions of awareness of religious concepts. Our results convey the importance of investigating why religious diversity in society may not always have a positive impact on intergroup relations.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by an interior research grant of Zefat Academic College to both authors. We wish to thank Oryan Liberman and Athar Fuarsa for help in data collection. Both authors contributed equally to composing this article.

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  1. Department of Behavioral Sciences, Zefat Academic College, Safed, Israel

    Lipaz Shamoa-Nir & Irene Razpurker-Apfeld

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  1. Lipaz Shamoa-Nir
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Correspondence to Lipaz Shamoa-Nir.

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Lipaz Shamoa-Nir declares that she has no conflict of interest. Irene Razpurker-Apfeld declares that she has no conflict of interest.

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Shamoa-Nir, L., Razpurker-Apfeld, I. Religious Primes and Threat-Perceptions as Predictors of Attitudes toward Muslims in Israel. Integr. psych. behav. 54, 392–415 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-019-09509-z

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