How a “Hypocrisy Intervention” Could Reduce Hostility toward Muslims

The rationale behind these anti-Muslim crimes is that because non-Muslims see Muslims “as part of the collective that you hold responsible, they then become legitimate targets of retribution,” says Nour Kteily, an associate professor of management and organizations.

Sometimes this sentiment is even stated explicitly in the aftermath of an attack. For instance, after the killings at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris in 2015, media mogul Rupert Murdoch tweeted that “until [Muslims] recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer, they must be held responsible.”

There is, however, one important catch: when that group is our own, we are far less inclined to blame other members of the group. That’s because we derive part of our identity from the groups we belong to, so blaming our group is almost like blaming ourselves.

This is why the white community typically does not blame all white people for the actions of white extremists, such as Dylann Roof’s killing of nine black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. “It’s just assumed that these are the actions of a disturbed individual,” Kteily says.

In a recent study, Kteily and coauthors investigated whether highlighting this inconsistency in logic could reduce hostility toward Muslims. After all, most people don’t like to think that they’re hypocrites.

Indeed, in two experiments, they found that people who underwent a “hypocrisy intervention” blamed the Muslim community less for extremist attacks and reported less hostility toward Muslims. These differences held up a month later, even shortly after an attack by Muslim extremists. And though the effects weakened substantially by the one-year mark, there was still evidence of the intervention’s effectiveness. Moreover, it’s possible that repeating interventions periodically could boost their effects in staving off hostility, Kteily says.

“There’s a hopeful message here,” he says, “which is that people respond to being shown evidence of their potential inconsistency.”

A Rise in Hate Crimes

In an earlier study, Kteily and his collaborators, Emile Bruneau and Emily Falk at the University of Pennsylvania, tested several possible strategies to defuse hostility against Muslims among non-Muslim participants in the U.S. They found that prompting people to reflect on the fact that they don’t collectively blame their own group for acts by individual members reduced the hypocritical tendency to blame all Muslims for extremist attacks.

In general, “people like to be consistent,” Kteily says.

The classic theory of this phenomenon, called cognitive dissonance, suggests that when our attitudes and behaviors don’t line up, the mismatch feels uncomfortable. For example, if you believe that smoking is bad, but you continue smoking, you’ll feel an urge to resolve the inconsistency, either by quitting smoking or changing your belief about the ill effects.

But Kteily’s earlier study left a few open questions. Would the hypocrisy intervention work in places outside the United States? Could the researchers explain in more psychological detail why it worked? Perhaps most importantly, would the effects hold up over time?

In the U.S. study, the researchers measured feelings toward Muslims immediately after the hypocrisy exercise. But they didn’t test whether people’s attitudes quickly reverted to their usual state. Additionally, in this type of experiment, when the assessment occurred right after the intervention, there was also a danger that participants suspected the study’s purpose and gave the answers they thought the researchers wanted.

Highlighting Hypocrisy

To put the intervention through more stringent tests, Kteily and Bruneau collaborated with Ana Urbiola, now at the University of Almeria. The researchers decided that they would run a similar experiment but check in again with participants a month and a year later.

In early August 2017, the team recruited 434 non-Muslim people for an online survey in Spain. Half of the participants served as a control group and did not receive any intervention.

The other half of participants underwent the hypocrisy intervention. First, they read about three attacks by white extremists, such as Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011. They were asked to score, on a scale of 0 to 100, how responsible white Europeans as a group were for each crime, as well as how responsible they personally felt. As predicted, participants rated themselves and their overall white European group as very low in responsibility for these extremist actions by individual in-group members.

Next, the intervention group read about Muslim extremists who killed 130 people in Paris and Saint-Denis in 2015. Then they read about a Muslim person who was not involved in the attacks, such as a bakery owner, and scored how responsible that person was for those crimes.

The idea behind the exercise is that “you see the logical parallel,” Kteily says. “You recognize in some sort of anticipatory way that, were you to then hold Muslims responsible, that would be hypocritical and inconsistent given that you don’t do the same when it comes to your own group.”

Finally, the researchers asked the control and intervention groups questions to assess how much they blamed all Muslims, or all Muslims in a particular country, for an extremist attack. The team also gauged anti-Muslim sentiment on several measures, such as whether the participant felt uncomfortable having Muslim refugees as neighbors.