Evidence of Positive Intergroup Perceptions About the Role of Religious Belief in an Intractable Conflict

Diversity of religious belief and identity is widely believed to be a source of intergroup conflict. Yet, emerging research challenges the notion that belief in God promotes parochialism. Because inaccurate and negative intergroup perceptions often underlay conflict, we theorized that negative perceptions about outgroup members’ religious beliefs may represent an independent source of discord. Contrary to this prediction, three preregistered experiments demonstrate that religious Muslim Palestinians and Jewish Israelis believe that the other understands their God to be an entity that encourages intergroup prosociality and benevolence. Muslim Palestinians (Study 1, N = 314) and Jewish Israelis (Study 2, N = 394) predicted outgroup members would give more money in intergroup contexts when asked to think about God. Study 3 (N = 373) extends this to a more conflict-adjacent domain; Jewish Israelis predicted that Muslim Palestinians believed God would prefer them to value the lives of Jews and Muslims more equally.

Urban Space and Social Cognition: The Effect of Urban Space on Intergroup Perceptions

Cities and neighborhoods are key sites of migration-related diversity. Differences in lifestyle, class, ethnicity, or religion become visible in urban spaces, such as neighborhood bars, shops, or cafes. This article applies a social cognitive approach to explore how urban spaces shape the relationship between ethnic encounters and intergroup perceptions. Theoretical work on urbanism suggests that public and private spaces have different effects on people’s perceptions of group interdependence and relative group status. This article contributes to the ongoing debate between conflict and contact schools of thought by defining how contextual conditions promote ethnic diversity’s positive or negative effects on intergroup perceptions.

Where Are You From? An Investigation Into the Intersectionality of Accent Strength and Nationality Status on Perceptions of Nonnative Speakers in Britain

We explore how interpersonal and intergroup perceptions are affected by a nonnative speaker’s accent strength and the status of their home country. When nationality information was absent (Study 1), natives who heard a strong (vs. weak) accent rated the speaker as warmer but immigrants as a group as more threatening. This result was replicated when the speaker’s nationality was familiar (Study 2) but in this study, country status further shaped accent-based perceptions: the strong (vs. weak) accented speaker evoked more positive interpersonal perceptions when her country status was low, but more negative intergroup perceptions when her country status was high. When the status of the speaker’s nationality was manipulated (Study 3), we replicated the interpersonal perceptions found in Study 1 and the intergroup perceptions found in Study 2. Findings support a holistic approach to investigating perceptions of nonnative speakers: one that considers nationality as well as accent strength.