Anti-Muslim bias in France stems more from felt threat than from beliefs

Evidence

Experiments can be a fruitful means for uncovering attitudes and emotions toward particular out-groups. For example, Adida, Laitin, and Valfort (2010) have developed a series of experiments to gauge non-Muslim French participants’ generosity toward French Muslim participants. They found that non-Muslim French exhibit less generosity toward Muslims under a variety of circumstances, and that this outcome depends more upon emotional sense of threat than upon rational beliefs about expected Muslim behavior (Adida, Laitin, and Valfort 2010: 4, 20). — Erik Bleich, Defining and Researching Islamophobia, 65

Categorization

• CANDY: A neat tweetable finding: discrimination tracks gut-level threat, not calculated expectation.
• SEED: Article angle: why appeals to ‘rational’ argument fail to dislodge anti-minority bias, since the driver is emotional.