Veiled Tolerance: Unmasking the Dynamics of Education in the Strategic Expression of Tolerance toward Muslim Newcomers

• In Event: 30417 - Fear, Belonging, and Immigration: Experiences of Migrants and Host Societies

Abstract

Research on (in)tolerance in Western contexts often highlights the beneficial impact of higher education on tolerance, particularly toward out-groups like immigrants or ethnic/racial/religious minorities. We point out the limits in our understanding on the expression of tolerance by directly addressing the dynamics of social desirability bias (SDB), which can lead to non-trivial differences between openly (i.e., overt) and strategic (i.e., covert) expression of (in)tolerance – over time and by levels of completed education. We embed our list experiments in the 2015 and 2017 Norwegian Citizen Panel to measure attitudes towards Muslim people, Muslim immigrants, and Muslim refugees over time. This design allows us to unveil educational gradients in open and strategic attitudes which permit a direct test of the relationship between greater attained education and overtly expressed tolerance. The unique insight is the ability to observe and account for strategic concealment of (in)tolerance. Results clearly show that the positive gap between the Muslim immigrants-related and Muslim refugees-related SDB expressed by the higher-educated marginally increases across time. In contrast, the negative gap between the Muslim people-related and Muslim immigrants-related SDB halves during the same period. We conclude that being within distinct educational strata results in the expression of similar and dissimilar SDB. The key to interpret the observed strategic requires understanding the sensitivity of respondents to the perceived out-group. This requires that we reconsider educational expansion as a universal mechanism by which out-group antipathy is moderated.

Authors

• Natalia Cornelia Malancu, University of Geneva

• Mathew Jamieson Creighton, Bogaziçi University