Exploring the boundaries of societally acceptable bias expression toward Muslim and atheist defendants in four mock-juror experiments

ABSTRACT

Religious minorities have experienced bias in many domains including the criminal justice system. The Normative Window of prejudice model posits that some bias expression is societally acceptable, while other bias expression is unacceptable and thus suppressed. Four mock-juror studies test the boundaries of normative expression of bias toward religious minorities. Participants expressed bias against (i.e., prejudice) Muslim defendants who commit violence motivated by religion (Study 1), yet also expressed bias toward (i.e., favoritism) Muslim defendants who commit violence in response to being attacked because of their religion (Study 2). Motive thus might determine whether bias expression is acceptable. Alternative explanations (religious activism; intentionality) are eliminated (Studies 3, 4). Results did not generalize to atheist defendants, who experienced little bias. Generally, Christian participants were more punitive than non-Christians, but there was little evidence of ingroup bias. These studies contribute to theory and literature by defining the circumstances that justify the expression of anti-Muslim bias. We conclude by suggesting that there are indeed societal norms regarding prejudice against religious minorities in the criminal justice system.

KEYWORDS:

• Prejudice
• Religion
• Salience
• Intergroup bias
• Normative Window
• Atheists
• Muslims

Author note

This research was funded by the American Psychology-Law Society Grant-In-Aid and the American Psychology-Law Society Diversity in Psychology and Law grants to the second and third authors respectively. Preliminary results of Study 1 were presented at the 2012 Psychology and Law pre-conference at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference. Preliminary results of Study 2 were presented at the 2015 conference for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the presentation was a finalist in the graduate student poster award competition. Preliminary results of Study 4 were presented at the 2016 Psychology and Law pre-conference at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference. The authors would like to thank Brooke Robertson who helped with data entry and multiple peers who gave feedback on early versions of this research.

Notes

¹ All authors are affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Social Psychology PhD Program.

² It is not possible to test the effects of every single religious minority in a single article. In choosing the religiosity of the people in our vignettes, we did an informal poll of approximately 20 students (who loosely represented our Study 1 sample) to determine which groups might experience the most bias. By far, the two groups mentioned most were Muslims and atheists. We also believe, based on a quick literature search, that there is an abundance of research that would support that these groups experience prejudice (as compared to, for instance bias against Jehovah’s Witnesses). We chose Muslim and atheists, even though we recognize that they are only a small part of these growing religious minorities.

³ Sample sizes for all studies were determined before data collection. All data collection was terminated prior to analysis.

⁴ In each study, there were some exploratory dependent variables unrelated to hypotheses that were included as pilot for possible future study. These are not reported here or elsewhere.

⁵ M-Turk is an online recruitment tool which allows researchers to recruit participants for internet-based surveys. Compared to student samples, samples from M-Turk are generally more diverse and provide results that are comparable to those obtained from a sample of US residents (see Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011).

⁶ The Overall Perception of Alibi Witness was marginally significant at p = 0.055, however no marginally significant results are reported here.

⁷ This study is not intended to suggest any direct link between the September 11 attacks and prejudice against Muslims. September 11 is offered as a well-used example of an event that might promote such prejudice and is not intended to serve as a causal impetus for bias. Indeed, there is recent research suggesting that no such link exists; instead, such prejudice is driven by the effort of political groups (Bail, 2014). That debate is beyond the scope of this article; suffice it to say that prejudice exists, possibly as a result of many factors.