📮 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.
