Meta-stereotypes of groups with opposite religious views: Believers and non-believers

摘要

Recent research on meta-stereotypes, that is, ingroup members' beliefs about how the outgroup sees them, may be of importance for intergroup relations between believers and non-believers, especially in the context of increasingly secularized societies. How do believers and non-believers think that outgroup members, respectively non-believers and believers, see them? Do these meta-stereotypes accurately reflect the outgroup's actual stereotypes? We investigated these questions by focusing on a series of relevant characteristics selected on the basis of previous research on religion and personality. Participants (n=100) provided their stereotypes and meta-stereotypes on eight personality traits. Believers and non-believers tended to share the meta-stereotype that the outgroup members see them as respectively high versus low in prosociality and conservatism and low versus high in hedonism and impulsivity. In contrast, believers seemed to ignore that non-believers see them as dogmatic and non-believers often exaggerated their meta-stereotypes in comparison to how believers actually saw them. Finally, highly identified group members tended to deny the outgroup's core characteristic, that is, believers' relative higher altruism and non-believers' relative lower dogmatism. We discuss the importance of knowing commonalities and discrepancies between stereotypic and meta-stereotypic perceptions for understanding intergroup perceptions and relations between groups that hold conflicting religious positions.