Rethinking Value Violation: Priming Religion Increases Prejudice in Singaporean Christians and Buddhists

Abstract

Ingroup religious priming has been shown to increase prejudice in American Christians, but it is currently unknown whether this effect can be generalized to other religions and cultures. The present research assessed the effects of religious priming on attitudes toward religious and cultural outgroups in Christian and Buddhist students at a Singapore university. Both Christians and Buddhists primed with religious ingroup words demonstrated more negative pretest to posttest attitude change toward homosexuals than those primed with neutral words. This effect remained even when statistically controlling for levels of right-wing authoritarianism and spirituality. These results indicate that religious priming affects Christians and Buddhists in the same way, promoting bias towards culturally relevant outgroups even in the absence of religious value-violation. This suggests that religion may exert its prejudicial effects indirectly through activation of associated cultural value systems, such as traditionalism/conservatism.