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Implicit and Explicit Attitudes toward Abrahamic Religions. Comparison of Direct and Indirect Assessment

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Xenosophia and Religion. Biographical and Statistical Paths for a Culture of Welcome

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Abstract

In this chapter, we consider the problem that many measures of religiosity and prejudice are at risk to be affected by socially desirable responding. Indirect measurement procedures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) provide an opportunity to assess also pre-reflective, impulsive parts of attitudes avoiding the risk of socially desirable responding. Hence, three Single-Category IATs (SC-IATs) have been used in the Bielefeld Study on Xenosophia and Religion in order to assess implicit attitudes toward the three Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam among a subsample of n = 272 persons. Participants on average displayed a slightly positive implicit attitude toward Christianity while Judaism and Islam were evaluated almost completely neutrally. While there are significant implicit-explicit correlations for attitudes toward Christianity and Islam, there is no such association for Judaism; maybe because Judaism has been a less salient category among the predominantly Christian, but partly also Muslim participants. While some measures of religiosity (centrality of religiosity and the religious schemata ttt and ftr) showed to be correlated with social desirability, the religious schema xenos showed no association with social desirable responding, but turned out to be a significant predictor of lower Islamophobic prejudice both on the explicit and implicit level of cognition. Consequences and limitations of the described findings are discussed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Please note that, from the perspective of religious studies, of course several stimuli could refer to more than one of the three Abrahamic religions: E.g., Moses is a prominent figure not only in the Jewish tradition, but in the other two traditions as well, Jesus is also a recognized prophet in Islam, and, at least in German, the term kosher can also be used to describe the Muslim way of food preparation. But for measures like SC-IATs aiming at assessing impulsive, automaticed reactions, it is primarily important to choose stimuli which are spontaneously associated with a certain target. Hence, they should be familiar, rather short, and stereotypical for the respective target.

  2. 2.

    This is a clear weakness of our study: If we had been able to include a Jewish subgroup in our sample, our analyses would have provided the opportunity to detect group-specific patterns. However, as our review of IAT studies on inter-religious attitudes and prejudice has shown, the focus throughout the last decade has been clearly on the relation between Christians and Muslims (Henry & Hardin, 2006; Park et al., 2007; Rowatt et al., 2005; Wigboldus et al., 2006) while the relation of these two groups to Jews and vice versa has been studied only sparsely (e.g. Rudman et al., 1999). Hence, future studies should lay similar emphasis on implicit attitudes in both directions: attitudes toward Jews and attitudes of Jews toward the other religions.

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  1. Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität München, München, Germany

    Constantin Klein & Ramona Bullik

  2. Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Heinz Streib

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  1. Research Center for Biographical Studies in Contemporary Religion, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Heinz Streib

  2. Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität München, München, Germany

    Constantin Klein

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Klein, C., Bullik, R., Streib, H. (2018). Implicit and Explicit Attitudes toward Abrahamic Religions. Comparison of Direct and Indirect Assessment. In: Streib, H., Klein, C. (eds) Xenosophia and Religion. Biographical and Statistical Paths for a Culture of Welcome. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74564-0_8

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