Common Inclusive Identity as a Prevention Against Anti-Muslim Responses to Threat: The Roles of Personal Control and Political Orientation / La identidad común inclusiva para prevenir una respuesta anti islámica a la amenaza: el papel del control per

Personal threat perceptions increase outgroup prejudice, potentially as an effort to restore a threatened sense of control through one’s ingroup. According to group-based control theory, personal threat effects on non-Muslims’ prejudice toward Muslims should disappear when Muslims are perceived as part of the ingroup. We tested this in two experiments among non-Muslim Germans (total N = 1,141). We manipulated the salience of high (vs. low) threat to personal control and whether Muslims were framed as outgroup or part of the (diverse superordinate) ingroup in the context of an imagined conflict with radical Islamists. Contrary to our preregistered hypothesis, the predicted two-way interaction of threat × categorization was not supported in either study. Exploratory analyses indicated that framing Muslims as part of the ingroup (vs. outgroup) increased left-wing, but not right-wing, participants’ anti-Muslim prejudice under high (vs. low) threat (Study 1). Exploratory analyses also revealed that Muslims as part of the ingroup (vs. outgroup) framing reduced conservatives’ anti-Muslim prejudice under high threat (Study 2)—however, only among those reporting that the Russian–Ukrainian war did not change their image of Germany. Conservatives’ anti-Muslim responses to threat may not be unconditional but could be eliminated by mentally including Muslims in diverse ingroups.