Wrestling with perceptions: how WWE live events in Saudi Arabia shaped views of Muslims in the United States

In 2018, the Saudi Ministry of Sport and WWE announced a 10-year agreement to host multiple WWE events in Saudi Arabia to be broadcast around the world. Although these events were intended to drive tourism to Saudi Arabia, they may also have improved attitudes toward Muslims among WWE fans in line with the parasocial contact hypothesis, which argues that positive exposure to members of a minority group through the media can improve feelings toward that group. I test this proposition using two studies. First, an analysis of tweets from professional wrestling fans suggests that relative to fans of another professional wrestling company, WWE fans saw a substantial increase in positive posts about Muslims following WWE's events in Saudi Arabia. Second, using an online survey experiment, I find that exposure to WWE events in Saudi Arabia increased feelings of commonality toward Muslims among WWE fans, which is a key mechanism through which attitude change occurs. Taken together, these results improve our understanding of the parasocial contact hypothesis and provide evidence that under certain conditions, attitude change can occur not just via exposure to positive depictions of well-known members of outgroups, but incidental exposure to outgroups members as well.