The Role of Christianity and Islam in Explaining Prejudice against Asylum Seekers: Evidence from Malaysia

ABSTRACT

Prejudicial attitudes toward asylum seekers are prevalent, and an emerging body of literature has revealed that this is partly driven by religious affiliation. The population of Malaysia is multireligious, making it a fruitful location for testing religion-based prejudice hypotheses. Thus, across 2 studies we tested the roles of Christianity and Islam in explicit and implicit prejudices against asylum seekers in the Malaysian context. In Study 1 (n = 97), we present evidence that there are religion-based differences in prejudice against asylum seekers; specifically, Muslims reported higher levels of (classical) explicit prejudice toward asylum seekers than Christians (there were no differences in conditional or implicit prejudices). In Study 2 (n = 117), we tested the hypothesis that these religion-based differences are qualified by the religion of the asylum seeker. In this study, we used a framing paradigm to experimentally manipulate the religion of the asylum-seeking targets. The results revealed an out-group exacerbation effect; that is, participants reported higher levels of prejudice toward asylum seekers who had a different religion from their own. For classical explicit prejudice, the effect was strongest from Muslims toward Christian asylum seekers. Conversely, for implicit prejudice, the reverse was true: The effect was strongest from Christians toward Muslim asylum seekers. These findings are discussed in terms of the political and social circumstances in Malaysia, but we interpret these findings as evidence that explicit and implicit attitudes toward asylum seekers are driven by a complex pattern of religion-based intergroup biases.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Southeast Asia comprises 13 countries, of which only three (Cambodia, the Philippines, and Timor-Lest) are parties to either the Convention or the 1967 Protocol. Notably, the regional leaders, including Malaysia, are not members of this list (also missing are Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia; Asylum Insight, 2018).

2. The number of participants recruited for both studies was based on the funding available to the authors rather than on a statistically predetermined sample size. Therefore we stress that null findings might be Type II errors for a very small effect size; see the General Discussion section for more detail.

3. The fewer degrees of freedom reflect that a number of participants did not complete one or both of the experimental GNAT blocks.

4. We ran all analyses with and without age included as a covariate in the model; there were no major differences in the findings, and the covariate did not interact with the other independent variables, and so in the interest in conserving statistical power, here we report the analyses without the covariates.

5. Forty-two participants did not complete the GNAT—a particularly high dropout rate. The t tests were conducted to explore differences between the portion of the sample that did versus did not complete the GNAT, and no significant differences were found on any of the remaining dependent measures (p > .381). Therefore, analysis for the implicit measure was conducted with available data. The data (and materials) from this study are available by contacting the corresponding author.

6. Even though there were no differences between religious groups on religious fundamentalism scores, these scores correlated with implicit prejudice scores for Christian participants giving us some concern about whether to statistically control for this variable. We conducted the analysis both with and without controlling for this variable, and each analysis produced similar findings (as with Study 1, analyses are presented without controlling for religious fundamentalism in order to conserve power).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an internal grant from the Faculty of Health Sciences at Australian Catholic University.