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Far-right political parties in Europe regularly portray Muslims and Islam as backward and a symbolic threat to secular and/or Christian European culture. Similarly, Islamist groups regularly portray Westerners and Western culture as decadent and a symbolic threat to Islam. Here, we present experimental evidence that meta-cultural threat - information that members of an outgroup perceive one's own culture as a symbolic threat to their culture - increases intention and endorsement of political violence against that outgroup. We tested this in three experimental studies among Muslims and non-Muslims in Scandinavia. In Studies 1 and 2, we experimentally manipulated whether the dominant majority group was portrayed as seeing Muslim culture and lifestyle as backward and incompatible with their own culture. These portrayals increased the endorsement of extremist violence against the West and violent behavioural intentions among Muslims living in Denmark and Sweden. Study 3 used a similar paradigm among non-Muslim Danes and demonstrated that learning about Muslims portraying the non-Muslim Danish in-group as a threat increased endorsement of ethnic persecution of Muslims, conceptually replicating the general effect that meta-cultural threat fuels endorsement of extremist violence among both majority and minority groups.

Islamist extremism is often explained by the suffering endured by Muslims in Islamic countries as a result of Western-led wars. However, many terrorist attacks have been carried out by European Muslims with no personal experiences of war. Across two studies among Danish Muslims, we tested if what we call victimization-by-proxy processes motivate behavioral intentions to commit acts of violence. We used Muslim identification, perceived injustice of Western foreign policies, and group-based anger to predict violent and nonviolent behavioral intentions. More importantly, we compared path models of Danish Muslims from conflict zones with those without direct personal experience of Western-led occupation. We found similar effects among the participants in each category, that is, vicarious psychological responses mimicked those of personally experienced adversity. In fact, participants born in Western Europe were, on average, more strongly identified with Muslims, more likely to perceive Western foreign policy as more unjust, reported greater group-based anger, and were more inclined to help Muslims both by nonviolent and violent means.

Islamist extremism is often explained by the suffering endured by Muslims in Islamic countries as a result of Western‐led wars. However, many terrorist attacks have been carried out by European Muslims with no personal experiences of war. Across two studies among Danish Muslims, we tested if what we call "victimization‐by‐proxy processes" motivate behavioral intentions to commit acts of violence. We used Muslim identification, perceived injustice of Western foreign policies, and group‐based anger to predict violent and nonviolent behavioral intentions. More importantly, we compared path models of Danish Muslims from conflict zones with those without direct personal experience of Western‐led occupation. We found similar effects among the participants in each category, that is, vicarious psychological responses mimicked those of personally experienced adversity. In fact, participants born in Western Europe were, on average, more strongly identified with Muslims, more likely to perceive Western foreign policy as more unjust, reported greater group‐based anger, and were more inclined to help Muslims both by nonviolent and violent means.

A sense of shared Muslim suffering seems to play a key role in uniting Muslims around the world. Therefore, in the current paper we hypothesized that the social psychological underpinnings of Islamist extremism would be similar for Muslims living in the West and Muslims living in countries with prolonged and ongoing exposure to Western-led military interventions. Across 4 studies among Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan (Ns = 425, 402, and 127) and Muslims living in 20 Western countries (N = 366), we examined a path model in which group-based anger mediated the link between Muslim identification, perceived injustice of Western military and foreign policy, and violent behaviour intentions. Our results indicate that regardless of whether Muslims live in places with prolonged and ongoing experience of Western military interventions or not, the social psychological factors predicting violent Islamist extremism appear to be similar. We discuss implications for future theory and research.

This research took a person × situation approach to predicting prejudice by looking at how social worldviews interact with real‐world environmental factors to predict how people respond to immigrants within their local area. Taking a Dual Process Motivational approach, we hypothesized that a higher proportion of immigrants in the local community would be associated with negative attitudes toward immigration for respondents high in dangerous world beliefs. Conversely, we hypothesized that living in a highly affluent (as opposed to socioeconomically deprived) community would be associated with negative attitudes toward immigration for respondents high in competitive world beliefs. Both hypotheses were supported using regional information derived from national census data combined with representative survey data from a large telephone sample conducted in New Zealand (N = 6,489). These findings support the proposition that individual differences interact with specific features of the environment to predict people's levels of prejudice in distinct ways.