Beyond Anti-Muslim Sentiment

Abstract

Americans’ opposition toward building an Islamic community center at Ground Zero has been attributed solely to a general anti-Muslim sentiment. We hypothesized that some Americans’ negative reaction was also due to their motivation to symbolically pursue a positive U.S. group identity, which had suffered from a concurrent economic and political downturn. Indeed, when participants perceived that the United States was suffering from lowered international status, those who identified strongly with the country, as evidenced especially by a high respect or deference for group symbols, reported a stronger opposition to the “Ground Zero mosque” than participants who identified weakly with the country did. Furthermore, participants who identified strongly with the country also showed a greater preference for buildings that were symbolically congruent than for buildings that were symbolically incongruent with the significance of Ground Zero, and they represented Ground Zero with a larger symbolic size. These findings suggest that identifying group members’ underlying motivations provides unusual insights for understanding intergroup conflict.