1. The Survey
Our survey was developed to measure prejudice unobtrusively.Ìý Our findings suggest that there are many components to prejudiced beliefs, such as beliefs that Catholics and Protestants are fundamentally different, felt emotions towards the other group and diversified religious difference into political, ethnic and national difference. There was a large degree of variability in the views expressed.Ìý However whilst there was a large degree of overlap in scores across all groups and the strength of the views expressed were related to demographic factors such as gender, age and social class.Ìý Women tended to express less prejudiced views than men on average and those from less affluent areas more prejudiced attitudes than those from more affluent areas.Ìý
2. The Experiments
i. The Bus Study
Despite this success in devising the scale, it should be remembered that surveys can only measure some components of attitudes- the cognitive component, or what people think and perhaps to a lesser component how people feel.Ìý Emotion states are however highly sensitive to context.Ìý Our first experiment therefore assessed differences in levels of prejudice expressed in two equivalent groups of students who went on two very different bus tours.Ìý Those who went on a bus tour of Belfast highlighting its troubled and violent past expressed more prejudice than those that went on a tour highlighting the new positive face of Belfast.Ìý This experiment demonstrates the role of context and emotion in the development and expression of prejudice. ÌýÌý
ii. The Lost Letter Study
A second important component of prejudice is behaviour.Ìý In reality most of us are most bothered when prejudice affects behaviour.Ìý Using a classic psychological paradigm, we examined whether people’s behaviour was affected by religion on the streets of Northern Ireland.Ìý We ‘lost’ 400 letters in Northern Ireland bearing stereotypically Protestant and Catholics names in residentially segregated areas.Ìý We found no evidence that people living in segregated Protestant or Catholic neighbourhoods returned lost letters of co-religionists more often than those addressed to someone of the other religious group.Ìý However, return rates were generally low in segregated areas with a strong history of violence.Ìý To establish if perceived threat was the cause of this effect, we lost another 200 letters in these same segregated areas with a history of violence.Ìý This time the letters were addressed to Catholic or Protestant groups (rather than individuals).Ìý Overall, lost letters addressed to groups of the other religious denomination were less likely to be returned and this was particularly the case where the address indicated a religious-national affiliation (British Presbyterian Society) rather than a religious-spiritual affiliation (E.g. Irish Catholic Choral Society).Ìý
iii. The Implicit Association Test
Any survey of prejudice assumes that we are both willing and able to report our own prejudices.Ìý Recently psychologists have attempted to get behind peoples declared survey responses.Ìý One way to do this is to measure people’s implicit associations, or the subconscious association of favourable ideas with one group and unfavourable ideas with the other group.Ìý We set up a computer task to assess this.Ìý We found that overall Catholics tended to associate positive or favourable words with Irish/Catholic images and Protestants tended to associate positive or favourable words with Protestant/British images.Ìý We found no evidence that these implicit associations were weaker in more affluent areas, or that they were related to age or gender.Ìý Overall this would suggest that there is implicit psychological baggage in Northern Ireland which is evidenced in the tendency to assess your own religious group more favourably than the other group.
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