How Religion Influences Individual Attitudes

New psychological research on integration and xenophobia

The field of psychology will broaden social science research at the Cluster “Religion and Politics” of the WWU. Two new research projects examine the influence of religion on attitudes towards foreigners and refugees. Psychologist Prof. Dr. Mitja Back heads the project “Prejudice, Conspiracy Theories and Negative Stereotype: The Influence of Individual and Contextual Religious Factors”, together with political scientist Prof. Dr. Bernd Schlipphak. In interdisciplinary collaboration, they analyse how religion shapes attitudes towards foreigners. In another project, “Integration at first sight”, Mitja Back explores the “significance of religious affiliations for first mutual impressions of refugees and Germans”, as the subheading of the project reads. Both projects are part of the research field of “Integration” of the Cluster of Excellence.

The interdisciplinary project of Prof. Back and Prof. Schlipphak combines analyses of psychology and political science of the interrelations between religion and xenophobia. “A combination of individual, psychological predispositions and social communication processes determines how people perceive prejudice, conspiracy theories and negative stereotypes, whether they adopt them and whether they develop corresponding political attitudes,” the scholars explain. By looking at religion from an individual and at the same time social angle, they want to understand what causes the escalation or the containment of religiously or politically motivated conflicts. The scholars are going to conduct surveys in Germany, Poland, Jordan and Lebanon, all countries with different religious contexts, and evaluate secondary data from political science and psychology.

Religion as a resource or barrier of integration

In another project, Prof. Back analyses the influences of religion on integration by determining the first mutual impressions of refugees and Germans empirically. “In order to understand to what extent religion can be a resource or a barrier for integration, the project analyses those psychological processes that account for integration and understanding or isolation and radicalisation,” the scholar says. He wants to examine what effects religious affiliation and religious beliefs have on the first impression and how they evoke – together with further social and personal factors – sympathy, trustworthiness or aggressiveness. To begin, the scholar carries out tests by evaluating photographs. After that, in laboratory and field studies, he will analyse the first impressions in direct meetings using video recordings. The project at the Cluster of Excellence is also supported by the research initiative “Psychological Aspects of Refugee Integration” (PARI) at the Department of Psychology of the WWU.

Since 2012, Prof. Dr. Mitja Back has been professor of Psychological Assessment and Personality Psychology at the Department of Psychology of the WWU. Among his research focus areas are the psychological aspects of integration of refugees, processes of personality development and the development of social relationships as well as the accuracy of character assessment. In his work, he makes use of a multi-methodological access to personality. (ill/vvm)