Exposure to White religious iconography influences Black individuals’ intragroup and intergroup attitudes.

Howard, Simon; Sommers, Samuel R.

doi:10.1037/cdp0000152

Cited by 16 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…cause shifts in racial and gender prejudice (Howard et al, 2018;Howard & Sommers, 2017. Interestingly, we did not find evidence that beliefs about Jesus race predicted individuals' implicit racial associations.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 86%

“…More recently, the relationship between Christianity and racial prejudice has been documented experimentally using priming techniques (e.g., Howard & Sommers, 2017, 2019; Johnson et al, 2010). For example, Johnson et al (2010) found that priming individuals with Christian concepts caused increases in both individuals’ explicit and subtle anti-Black attitudes.…”

Section: Relationship Between Christianity and Prejudicementioning

confidence: 99%

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“Jesus was a White man too!”: The relationship between beliefs about Jesus’s race, racial attitudes, and ideologies that maintain racial hierarchies.

Howard

Vine

Kennedy

2022

Psychology of Religion and Spirituality

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Historians, Black liberation theologians, and Black/Pan-African nationalists have long argued that individuals' beliefs regarding Jesus' race are related to their racial attitudes and ideologies that maintain racial hierarchy. In the current study, we examined the relationship between beliefs about Jesus' race, racial attitudes, social dominance orientation (SDO), and colorblind racial ideology (CBRI). We found that individuals who believe Jesus is White were higher in both explicit and subtle forms of anti-Black prejudice (i.e., symbolic racism) and had higher feelings of warmth toward White people than individuals who believe Jesus is non-White. In addition, we found that those who believe Jesus is White, versus non-White, had a higher preference for group-based social hierarchy and were more likely to endorse CBRI. Analyses indicated that SDO and CBRI fully mediated the relationship between believing Jesus is White and explicit anti-Black attitudes. The relationship between believing Jesus is White and subtle anti-Black prejudice was also fully mediated by CBRI. These findings advance research on the relationship between religiosity and prejudice by demonstrating that individuals' racial conceptualizations of religious deities are related to how they feel toward racial groups and the extent to which they endorse ideologies that maintain social hierarchy. Implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 86%

Section: Relationship Between Christianity and Prejudicementioning

confidence: 99%

“Jesus was a White man too!”: The relationship between beliefs about Jesus’s race, racial attitudes, and ideologies that maintain racial hierarchies.

Howard

Vine

Kennedy

2022

Psychology of Religion and Spirituality

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“…We controlled for multiple ideologies (e.g., religiosity, conservatism, racial prejudice, sexist attitudes), recruited diverse participant groups (e.g., Black, White, male, female, adult, child, Christian, atheist), and considered both Christian and novel contexts, and consistently found evidence to suggest that attributing a social identity to God is another route by which religiosity predicts group-based prejudice. These data build on the recent finding that exposure to religious iconography predicts pro-White and anti-Black prejudice (Howard & Sommers, 2017, 2019), to demonstrate further and for the first time that attributing a social identity to God predicts widespread, early emerging, and intuitive conceptions of who deserves to rule.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 66%

God as a White man: A psychological barrier to conceptualizing Black people and women as leadership worthy.

Roberts¹,

Weisman²,

Lane³

et al. 2020

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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In the United States, God is commonly conceptualized as the omnipotent and omniscient entity that created the universe, and as a White man. We questioned whether the extent to which God is conceptualized as a White man predicts the extent to which White men are perceived as particularly fit for leadership. We found support for this across 7 studies. In Study 1, we created 2 measures to examine the extent to which U.S. Christians conceptualized God as a White man, and in Study 2 we found that, controlling for multiple covariates (e.g., racist and sexist attitudes, religiosity, political attitudes), responses on these measures predicted perceiving White male job candidates as particularly fit for leadership, among both Black and White, male and female, Christians. In Study 3, we found that U.S. Christian children, both White and racial minority, conceptualized God as more White than Black (and more male than female), which predicted perceiving White people as particularly boss-like. We next found evidence to suggest that this phenomenon is rooted in broader intuitions that extend beyond Christianity. That is, in a novel context with novel groups and a novel god, U.S. Christian adults (Studies 4 and 6), atheist adults (Study 5), and agnostic preschoolers (Study 7), used a god's identity to infer which groups were best fit for leadership. Collectively, our data reveal a clear and consistent pattern: Attributing a social identity to God predicts perceiving individuals who share that identity as more fit for leadership.

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“…Unlike other areas of psychology, where masking of faces and images is possibly the predominant technique for exploring subliminal processing (see, for example, van der Ploeg et al, 2017), morality and religiosity have been explored using masked or primed image stimuli only in a handful of studies. These few studies used non-morality related masked image primes and focused on whether these primes can induce disgust sensitivity (Preston, Ritter & Ivan Hernandez, 2010), political and secular conservatism (Samuel, 2016), whether the primes associated with developmental attachment (Birgegard & Granqvist, 2004), racial prejudice (Howard & Sommers, 2017), the regulation of negative emotion (Harenski, & Hamann, 2006) and moral and immoral attitudes as personality traits (Luo et al, 2006; see also Garrigan, Adlam & Langdon, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Speak of the Devil… and he Shall Appear”: Religiosity, Unconsciousness, and the Effects of Explicit Priming in the Misperception of Immorality

Tsikandilakis

Leong

et al. 2021

Psychological Research

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Psychological theory and research suggest that religious individuals could have differences in the appraisal of immoral behaviors and cognitions compared to non-religious individuals. This effect could occur due to adherence to prescriptive and inviolate deontic religious-moral rules and socioevolutionary factors, such as increased autonomic nervous system responsivity to indirect threat.The latter thesis has been used to suggest that immoral elicitors could be processed subliminally by religious individuals. In this manuscript we employed masking to test this hypothesis. We rated and pre-selected IAPS images for moral impropriety. We presented these images masked with and without negatively manipulating a pre-image moral label. We measured detection, moral appraisal and discrimination, and physiological responses. We found that religious individuals experienced higher responsivity to masked immoral images. Bayesian and hit-versus-miss response analyses revealed that the differences in appraisal and physiological responses were reported only for consciously perceived immoral images. Our analysis showed that when a negative moral label was presented, religious individuals experienced the interval following the label as more physiologically arousing and responded with lower specificity for moral discrimination. We propose that religiosity involves higher conscious perceptual and physiological responsivity for discerning moral impropriety but also higher susceptibility for the misperception of immorality.

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Exposure to White religious iconography influences Black individuals’ intragroup and intergroup attitudes.

Abstract: Although there are many contributing factors to explain why Black adults and children may internalize anti-Black attitudes, the potential role religion may play in such processes-specifically the exposure to White religious iconography-cannot be ignored. (PsycINFO Database Record

Cited by 16 publications

References 46 publications

“Jesus was a White man too!”: The relationship between beliefs about Jesus’s race, racial attitudes, and ideologies that maintain racial hierarchies.

“Jesus was a White man too!”: The relationship between beliefs about Jesus’s race, racial attitudes, and ideologies that maintain racial hierarchies.

God as a White man: A psychological barrier to conceptualizing Black people and women as leadership worthy.

“Speak of the Devil… and he Shall Appear”: Religiosity, Unconsciousness, and the Effects of Explicit Priming in the Misperception of Immorality

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