Does religious priming predict low prejudice? The moderating role of agreeableness.

The relationships between personality, religion and prejudice have been studied in psychology for a while and are known to be closely linked. Agreeableness, as well as openness to experience, is known to be good predictors of low prejudice. On the other hand, even if agreeableness is commonly associated to religiosity, several studies have shown that priming religion could increase prejudice against various targets. Nevertheless, those priming studies were widely using Christian primes among Westerners. What happen if we prime religion of the “Other” among a population of Christian tradition? Through literature, we can expect that priming religion of the “Other” will increase prejudice by exacerbating ingroup identity. In this study, 117 Belgian students were randomly assigned to three conditions (Buddhist prime/Muslim prime/Control) and then completed an IAT measuring prejudice against Flemish. We found that the interaction between agreeableness and the Buddhist prime condition was predicting lower prejudice against Flemish compared to control condition. These results suggest that priming religious contents related to tolerance or universalism (like Buddhism) can moderate the agreeableness-prejudice link