Future Fear, Not Past Harm, Fuels Hindu–Muslim Hostility

📮 How the Evidence Was Collected

An electronic survey of 1,414 respondents gathered individual-level data to test three prominent explanations for why people promote conflict with out-groups in India’s Hindu–Muslim context. Novel approaches to data acquisition and analysis were used to probe the determinants of hostile attitudes and approval of violence.

📊 What Was Tested

Key concepts evaluated in the survey included:

• Future-oriented security concerns about personal or group prospects
• Prior experiences of violence or victimization
• Personal experiences and everyday interactions with members of the other community

🔑 Key Findings

• Security concerns about the future are strong predictors of a hostile stance and approval of violence.
• Experiences of violence in the past do not systematically perpetuate hostility.
• Personal experiences with out-group members strongly correlate with hostile sentiments.
• These patterns hold across alternative model specifications, after post-stratifying estimates to census benchmarks, and when using a Finite Mixture Models benchmark.

📌 Why It Matters

The evidence challenges the simple assumption that past victimization alone sustains intergroup hostility and instead highlights the prominent role of future-oriented insecurity and contemporary intergroup relations in shaping approval of conflict and violence.