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Religion and Intergroup Conflict: Findings From the Global Group Relations Project

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How might religion shape intergroup conflict? We tested whether religious infusion-the extent to which religious rituals and discourse permeate the everyday activities of groups and their members-moderated the effects of two factors known to increase intergroup conflict: competition for limited resources and incompatibility of values held by potentially conflicting groups. We used data from the Global Group Relations Project to investigate 194 groups (e.g., ethnic, religious, national) at 97 sites around the world. When religion was infused in group life, groups were especially prejudiced against those groups that held incompatible values, and they were likely to discriminate against such groups. Moreover, whereas disadvantaged groups with low levels of religious infusion typically avoided directing aggression against their resource-rich and powerful counterparts, disadvantaged groups with high levels of religious infusion directed significant aggression against them-despite the significant tangible costs to the disadvantaged groups potentially posed by enacting such aggression. This research suggests mechanisms through which religion may increase intergroup conflict and introduces an innovative method for performing nuanced, cross-societal research.
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... Fiske (2017) cautions that some prejudices are more common across cultures (e.g., sexism, ageism), whereas prejudice based on race, ethnicity, or religion is regionally specific. For example, the Rohingya-Buddhist Muslim group in Myanmar and Shia-Sunni in Iraq (Neuberg et al., 2014). Perceived threat and anxiety play an essential role in some religious prejudice (Rowatt & Al-Kire, 2021). ...
... In addition to prejudice, perceptions of religious threats can also lead to support for religiously justified violence (Beller & Kröger, 2017;Obaidi et al., 2018). Examples include Rohingya-Buddhist Muslims in Myanmar and Shi'a-Sunnis in Iraq (Neuberg et al., 2014). The Sunni-Shia conflict in Iraq after the United States invasion caused several Iraqis to migrate to Canada. ...
... Hindu-Muslims in India (Schutte, 2019;Deshmukh, 2021). Rohingya-Buddhist Muslims in Myanmar (Neuberg et al., 2014). Shi`a-Sunni in Iraq (Neuberg et al., 2014), and Pakistan (Mirza, 2017a;Mirza, 2017b). ...
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Religious prejudice adorns socio-religious issues in Indonesia, including on state university campuses. Some Muslim student activists are very aggressive in calling non-Muslims and minority Islamic sects as infidels. Their negative prejudice is that Christians and Hindus are infidels because they have three Gods. The Shi'a are heretical because they prioritize Imam Ali over the Prophet. Ahmadiyah is not Islam because they believe in Mirza Gulam Ahmad as the Prophet. However, their accusations have no reliable basis. Meanwhile, mature and religious students have positive and tolerant attitudes. The research aims to counteract religious prejudice in Muslim students through Islamic education based on religious maturity—a mixed-method research method. The research instrument is an inventory of religious prejudice and religious maturity. The research respondents were 300 Muslim students in Bandung and Palembang. The research results show that the religious maturity approach in Islamic education has effectively prevented religious prejudice in students. Before college, half of the respondents had a prejudice against non-Muslims and minority Islamic schools. But after college, their unfavorable discriminations diminished. They say that among non-Muslims, some believe and deserve to go to heaven. Shi'a and Ahmadiyya are both Muslims. The implication is that Islamic education based on religious maturity needs to be implemented in universities.
... Religious beliefs could facilitate human cooperation [1][2][3][4][5][6], promote civic engagement [7][8][9][10], improve life satisfaction [11][12][13] and even boom economic development [14][15][16]. On the other side, some aspects of religion may lead to regional violence, intergroup conflict and moral prejudice against atheists [17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Analogous to the separation of races [24], the religious segregation is a major ingredient resulting in increasing alienation, misunderstanding, cultural conflict and even violence among believers of different faiths [18,19,25]. ...
... On the other side, some aspects of religion may lead to regional violence, intergroup conflict and moral prejudice against atheists [17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Analogous to the separation of races [24], the religious segregation is a major ingredient resulting in increasing alienation, misunderstanding, cultural conflict and even violence among believers of different faiths [18,19,25]. ...
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Religious beliefs could facilitate human cooperation [1-6], promote civic engagement [7-10], improve life satisfaction [11-13] and even boom economic development [14-16]. On the other side, some aspects of religion may lead to regional violence, intergroup conflict and moral prejudice against atheists [17-23]. Analogous to the separation of races [24], the religious segregation is a major ingredient resulting in increasing alienation, misunderstanding, cultural conflict and even violence among believers of different faiths [18,19,25]. Thus far, quantitative understanding of religious segregation is rare. Here we analyze a directed social network extracted from weibo.com (the largest directed social network in China, similar to twitter.com), which is consisted of 6875 believers in Christianism, Buddhism, Islam and Taoism. This religion network is highly segregative, with only 1.6% of links connecting individuals in different religions. Comparative analysis shows that the extent of segregation for different religions is much higher than that for different races and slightly higher than that for different political parties. The few cross-religion links play a critical role in maintaining network connectivity, being remarkably more important than links with highest betweennesses [26] or bridgenesses [27]. Further content analysis shows that 46.7% of these cross-religion links are probably related to charitable issues. Our findings provide quantitative insights into religious segregation and valuable clues to encourage cross-religion communications.
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Religion makes unique claims (e.g., the existence of supernatural agents) not found in other belief systems, but is religion itself psychologically special? Furthermore, religion is related to many domains of psychological interest, such as morality, health and well-being, self-control, meaning, and death anxiety. Does religion act on these domains via special mechanisms that are unlike secular mechanisms? These could include mechanisms such as beliefs in supernatural agents, providing ultimate meaning, and providing literal immortality. We apply a critical eye to these questions of specialness and conclude that although it is clear that religion is psychologically important, there is not yet strong evidence that it is psychologically special, with the possible exception of its effects on health. We highlight what would be required of future research aimed at convincingly demonstrating that religion is indeed psychologically special, including careful definitions of religion and careful attention to experimental design and causal inference.
... This prosociality may arise from a greater love of humanity among those who are religious (Shepperd et al., 2021). However, religious individuals also can be complicit in allowing immoral actions to occur (Jackson & Gray, 2019;Weiss & Forstmann, 2024) or behave aggressively toward outgroups (Ginges et al., 2011;Neuberg et al., 2014). As Kimball (2002) noted, religion often plays a central role in the escalation of hostilities between individuals and groups across the globe. ...
... At the same time, it is a common assumption that religion causes the most gruesome intergroup conflicts (Huntington 1993). Supporting this perspective, religiousness has been shown to promote prejudice against minorities (Żemojtel-Piotrowska et al. 2021) and those who hold incompatible values (Neuberg et al. 2014). Conflict may even arise among Christians from different denominations, as indicated by their failure to cooperatively manage The Holy Sepulture, one of Christianity's most sacred places (thankfully, the Muslim Nuseibeh family took on this duty in the 7th century; Galor 2017). ...
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Christianity pledges the peaceful acceptance of attacks but elicited numerous intergroup conflicts. This contradiction may arise from basic group-processes, including the rejection of intergroup criticism. Catholic Christians (Experiment 1, N = 322, online; Experiment 2, N = 252 in-person survey during Church activities) responded to criticism of their faith that was either attributed to a fellow Catholic or a Protestant commenter. Criticism from a Protestant (vs. Catholic) source was rated to be less constructive, more threatening, and ascribed worse commenter characteristics. Outgroup criticism did not change support for the unity of Christians (ecumenism, Experiment 1) but increased the likelihood of praying for the commenter (Experiment 2). The content of outgroup-directed prayers was hostile. Effects emerged independent of reported fundamentalism and in a context highly conducive to inter-denomination debate. These findings demonstrate that religious group processes can evoke counter-normative defenses, thus spurring conflict. Understanding these processes may help mend divided societies.
... The social perspective often focuses on how religion fosters ingroup favouritism, outgroup derogation, morality or cooperation. An example of this is Neuberg et al. (2014), who investigated whether religious infusion in society was associated with intergroup conflict. They asked religious experts to rate the degree to which religious rituals, values, narratives, and reasoning were infused in the social and public life of the members of 194 religious groups, as well as how dominant religion is in the everyday lives of members of each group. ...
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