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Islamic Terrorism, Out-group Trust and the Motivation to Control

Extremism
Islam
Political Psychology
Social Capital
Terrorism
Marte Winsvold
Institute for Social Research, Oslo
Kari Steen-Johnsen
Institute for Social Research, Oslo
Marte Winsvold
Institute for Social Research, Oslo

Abstract

In a Europe characterized by civil unrest and the rise of populism, there is a widespread concern that we may be going towards more fearful and more polarized societies, with increasing levels of intolerance and distrust towards immigrants in general and Muslims in particular. Based on existing research, terrorist attacks of the kind that took place in continental Europe in 2015 and 2016 may be hypothesized to lead to increasing ethnic intolerance and distrust, driven by the fear that the attacks evoke in the population. On the other hand, studies of the importance of social norms, i.e. the motivation to control intolerant attitudes, have shown that such norms may act as buffers towards the development of anti-immigrant attitudes. In this article we use survey experiments from a Norwegian population study (N=2000) to examine the relationship between terror threat and out-group trust, focusing on the specific effects of emotional responses to a hypothetical terror threat and of the motivation to control. In the survey, respondents were exposed a news story that described an ISIS threat scenario, involving a specific terrorist threat against public buildings in Oslo. We analyze how the terror threat scenario affects the out-group trust of respondents (measured as trust in Muslims) and how this effect of the threat is mitigated by the respondents’ motivation to control their attitudes. We find that out-group trust is significantly lower with the group being exposed to the Islamic threat scenario than in the control group. Moreover, we find that those reporting to be frightened by the Islamic threat scenario are significantly less trustful towards Muslims than those reporting no such fear. When including motivation to control in the analysis, the effect of the scenario on trust in Muslims disappears, and the effect of fear is substantially reduced. Motivation to control accounts for the bulk of the explained variance in the model, also when controlled for age, gender, education and party preference. The results indicate that the motivation to control one’s attitudes towards out-groups renders individuals resilient to the effect of terror threats. The level of motivation to control in the population can consequently be expected to affect the attitudinal climate towards immigrants and thus the conditions for integration. The paper emanates from a comparative study that involves identical surveys in Norway, Spain, France, US and Finland, which will eventually allow for analyses of nation specific differences in the role of motivation to control.