A computer simulation suggests that one-sided media reports are making us all unconsciously Islamophobic

A recent experiment, soon to be published in the journal of experimental social psychology, offers provocative evidence that Islamophobia operates in the dark recesses of our unconscious. In the experiment, participants played a computer simulation and were asked to shoot individuals carrying weapons and to spare those unarmed. Participants were more likely to shoot unarmed individuals who were wearing turbans or hijabs. More interestingly, they were unaware and incredulous that they were doing so. The author of the experiment, Christian Unkelbach, a visiting scholar at Australia's University of New South Wales, has called this "the turban effect" and blames one-sided media reports.

Unkelbach's experiment is timely. As was reported in the Independent, Shahid Malik MP, a minister in the Department for International Development, believes Muslims in the UK increasingly feel hostility from members of the British community and misrepresentation by the media. Indeed, if Unkelbach's conclusions are correct, it raises a number of questions about the responsibility of the media in perpetuating Islamophobia in western countries.

Unkelbach's experiment also presents the occasion for deeper reflection. While Shahid Malik points to blatant and conscious discrimination, the "turban effect" is more insidious, because it highlights the danger of unconscious prejudices. Unkelbach blames the media post 9/11, although perhaps we should look further back. Edward Said's famous argument in his book Orientalism is that western society has a long history of categorising Muslims and Asians as "the other" – as different, dangerous and violent. Thus, the wearing of a turban or a hijab marks the wearer with a sense of otherness, of being inscrutable and thus deemed threatening.

But before we sharpen our knives and turn on the media, it is quite possible that the "turban effect" does not reveal a deep-seated (and recently revived) prejudice, but rather our instinctual disposition towards inductive reasoning – that is, making predictions about the future on the basis of past experience. The fact remains that the attacks of 9/11, 7/7 and Madrid were committed by individuals in the name of Islam (albeit a perverted interpretation). Is it not then somewhat rational to take greater notice – even if unconsciously, as much of our instinctual reasoning takes place behind the scenes – of visual representations of Islam in the context of assessing threats, simply because the last notable large-scale incidences of violent attacks were committed by self-proclaimed Muslims?

The only problem, of course, is that none of these men were wearing turbans during their respective attacks, or in their portrayal in the media. Not only that, even though inductive reasoning forms the basis of our everyday reasoning, it is often fallacious, and in the current context it could prove particularly pernicious, if it leads to such simple and unthinking connections.

Ultimately, whatever Unkelbach's experiment may reveal about our prejudices or the structure of human rationality, it at least brings our unconscious prejudices and implicit assumptions to our attention. Only then might we begin to understand them and move beyond them. [Link]

On March 15, 2004, a French law was passed banning students from wearing conspicuous religious symbols in primary and secondary public schools. The law is widely referred to as the "French headscarf ban." Last week, Professor Joan W. Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study, author of the forthcoming Politics of the Veil (Princeton University Press, October 2007), spoke to a capacity crowd at the Humanities Center's Levinthal Hall to explore the complex and underlying motives for the ban. The talk was a Stanford Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts.

"The French idea of 'one and indivisible' is different from E Pluribus Unum. There's a lack of any recognition for social difference," Scott said. Yet despite the claims of égalité, the French have "a deep uneasiness about sharing power." Scott outlined the emerging "cracks in French universalism."

The French portray their concept of universalism as "dating back to the French Revolution in a seamless story," she said. However, in the 19th century, class became the "great exception" to equality. After women received the vote in 1945, their inequality "had to be explained away." In the 1990s, gay rights and domestic partnership issues flagged more "exceptions." Now France continues to face the challenges of racism, immigration and religious intolerance.

The headscarf brought several of these issues to a head in a nation where "assimilation is seen as the passport to Frenchness."

One issue is the specter of Muslim inassimilability. Scott recalled that, during the 2005 riots in the Parisian housing projects, then-Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy blamed the troubles on "illegals." However, in the investigations, "they couldn't find many—they were French citizens," some of them second- and third-generation French.

She also pointed out that, in France, the word immigrant "doesn't refer to Portuguese, Spanish, Italians—Europeans or Eastern Europeans"; it only refers to former colonials, further pinpointing the Muslim population as different and problematic....

"Surely there is a better way of dealing with terrorism besides banning the headscarf," she added....

When [a] student asserted the ban was part of a general attempt to keep public schools secular, Scott said that no laws had been passed affecting yarmulkes, or Sikh turbans, until the headscarves became a concern. "This is a symbolic stand against Islam." [Link]

"When there's a war in Iraq, hate crime in the United States sort of pales in comparison," said Mehdi Bozorgmehr, noting one of the more recent obstacles faced by groups trying to rally Middle Eastern Americans to their own defense in the aftermath of 9/11. Bozorgmehr was guest lecturer at a public meeting of a UCLA sociology course on April 9, 2007, where he shared results of federally funded research on the backlash produced by 9/11 against Muslim Americans, Middle Easterners, South Asians, and individuals seen as "look-alikes." By a tabulation he cited, there were well over 600 hate crimes and at least four murders nationally in the days immediately following 9/11 that could be connected with the terrorist attacks. [Link]