The collective praise intervention: A brief intervention highlighting prosocial behavior reduces hostility towards Muslims

Abstract

Muslims are consistently the target of dehumanization and hostile policies. Previous research shows that interventions that highlight the hypocrisy wherein people collectively blame entire groups for the heinous acts of individual members of outgroups but not ingroups are effective in reducing animosity towards Muslims. However, these interventions rely on aversive materials (e.g., terrorist acts), which can hinder the scalability of interventions due to individuals’ tendency to resist/avoid challenging and aversive stimuli. In three preregistered studies (combined N = 2,635), we developed and tested a nonaversive, hypocrisy-based intervention that highlights the hypocrisy involved in attributing ingroup members’ prosocial acts to the entire ingroup (i.e., Christians) but not doing the same for outgroup members (i.e., Muslims). Results indicated that this collective praise intervention reliably reduces dehumanization of Muslims, anti-Muslim policy support, and collective blame of Muslims. We argue that the intervention’s use of nonaversive stimuli allows for both practical and scalable applications.

Reducing Explicit Blatant Dehumanization by Correcting Exaggerated Meta-Perceptions

“…Although subtle dehumanization likely plays an important role in intergroup relations, explicit blatant dehumanization is a consistently stronger predictor of hostility (Kteily & Landry, 2022). Therefore, more recent work has sought to reduce explicit blatant dehumanization (Gallardo et al, 2021; Moore-Berg et al, 2022).…”

Reducing Islamophobia: An assessment of psychological mechanisms that underlie anti-Islamophobia media interventions

“…Therefore, future research should incorporate intersectional approaches into their intervention design. Finally, although MTurk samples can mirror other online (Chandler et al, 2019) and face-to-face samples (Casler et al, 2013), and have been used in other similar intervention tournament experiments (Bruneau et al, 2018; Gallardo et al, 2021), these samples can be subject to data quality issues (Kennedy et al, 2020). Using various techniques, including preventing MTurk workers from participating in more than one study and including attention check questions, we attempted to maintain the high quality of data.…”

“…Concurrent with anti-Muslim speech and violence, legislation has been introduced in the U.S. at both state and federal levels to ban Sharia law (Pilkington, 2017) and prevent Muslims from entering the country (American Civil Liberties Union, 2018). Further, non-Muslim U.S. Americans reliably report liking Muslims (and people from Muslim majority countries) less than non-Muslims (Bruneau et al, 2018; Sides & Gross, 2013), dehumanize Muslims more than non-Muslims (Kteily & Bruneau, 2017), reserve more empathy for non-Muslim Americans than for Muslims (Bruneau et al, 2017), and collectively blame Muslims more and collectively praise Muslims less than Christians or broader categories of White people for violence committed by extremists from each group (Bruneau et al, 2018; Gallardo et al, 2021). In Western Europe, bias against Muslims is similarly high and has similarly escalated in recent years (Bayrakli & Hafez, 2017).…”

Giving peace a chance: Lessons from translational research in Colombia.

“…Emile’s research focused on better understanding the psychological and cognitive biases that drive intergroup conflict (Bruneau, 2012), and critically examining the impact of interventions aimed at decreasing intergroup hostility (Bruneau, Kteily et al, 2018; Gallardo et al, 2021). Specifically, he focused on the (lack of) empathy (Cikara et al, 2011, 2014), dehumanization (Bruneau et al, 2021; Bruneau, Jacoby, et al, 2018), and erroneous metaperceptions (i.e., how I think outgroup members perceive me and my ingroup; e.g., Moore-Berg et al, 2020) that often characterize intergroup conflicts; and how empathy and humanity can potentially be restored, and erroneous metaperceptions can be corrected through virtual and media-based encounters with “the other” (e.g., Bruneau et al, 2021; Moore-Berg et al, 2022).…”