Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, Vol 31(2), May 2025, 141-152; doi:10.1037/pac0000752
Interreligious conflicts are an ongoing concern, and researchers and practitioners face the challenge of how to reduce tension and promote more peaceful relations. One possibility for promoting more favorable interreligious attitudes comes from social cognitive research on priming, or increasing the salience of particular concepts in a person’s thought processes. The current research investigated the effects of exposure to abstract and concrete religious words on religious outgroup attitudes and how these were moderated by religious individual differences, religious fundamentalism (RF) and quest religiosity. A convenience sample of Canadian Christian university students (N = 125) completed measures of RF and quest. This was followed by a randomly assigned sentence-unscrambling task where participants were exposed to abstract or concrete religious words. Participants were asked to evaluate religious groups (Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and religious others) and nonreligious groups (agnostics, atheists, and nonreligious others) using evaluation thermometers. Multiple moderated regression showed that individual differences in RF and quest significantly interacted with the priming manipulation to predict religious outgroup evaluations. Concrete religious words appeared to influence religious outgroup evaluations for those low and high in RF. Abstract religious words appeared to influence religious outgroup evaluations for those low and high in quest. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)