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Does terror defeat contact? Intergroup contact and prejudice toward Muslims before and after the London bombings

Abrams, D.; Van de Vyver, J.; Houston, D.M.; Vasiljevic, M.

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Authors

D. Abrams

D.M. Houston



Abstract

Allport (1954) proposed a series of preconditions that have subsequently been shown to facilitate effects of intergroup contact on attitudes toward outgroups (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). The present study examines whether objective threat, in the form of the 2005 London 7/7 terror attack, can inhibit the positive effects of contact. We tested hypotheses that contact would affect prejudice toward Muslims regardless of the bombings (contact prevails) or that the bombings would inhibit the effects of contact on prejudice (threat inhibits). Data were collected through representative national surveys 1 month before and again 1 month after the attacks in London on July 7, 2005 (pre-7/7 N = 931; post-7/7 N = 1,100), which represent relatively low and relatively high salience of “objective threat.” Prejudice against Muslims significantly increased following the bombings. Psychological threats to safety (safety threat) and to customs (symbolic threat) mediated the impact of the bombings on prejudice, whereas perceived economic threat did not. All 3 types of psychological threat mediated between contact and prejudice. Multigroup structural equation modeling showed that, even though the objective threat did raise levels of psychological threats, the positive effects of contact on prejudice through perceived psychological threats persisted. Results therefore support a contact prevails hypothesis.

Citation

Abrams, D., Van de Vyver, J., Houston, D., & Vasiljevic, M. (2017). Does terror defeat contact? Intergroup contact and prejudice toward Muslims before and after the London bombings. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 23(3), 260-268. https://doi.org/10.1037/pac0000167

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Mar 1, 2016
Online Publication Date Feb 16, 2017
Publication Date Aug 1, 2017
Deposit Date Sep 6, 2018
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology
Print ISSN 1078-1919
Electronic ISSN 1532-7949
Publisher American Psychological Association
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 23
Issue 3
Pages 260-268
DOI https://doi.org/10.1037/pac0000167
Related Public URLs http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/30364/

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Copyright Statement
This article has been published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s). Author(s) grant(s) the American Psychological Association the exclusive right to publish the article and
identify itself as the original publisher.





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