Prejudice toward Muslims in New Zealand

Abstract

Following the March 15th Christchurch terrorist attack, members of our research team have been repeatedly asked to comment or provide summary statistics from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS) on prejudice toward Muslims. As the curators of the NZAVS, we think that these findings should be in the public domain and accessible to as wide an audience as possible. In this article, we aim to provide a comprehensive summary of what we know from the NZAVS about attitudes toward Muslims and prejudice in New Zealand more generally. From 2012 onwards, the NZAVS included a feeling thermometer rating of people’s level of warmth toward Muslims. Here, we summarize what we know from the NZAVS about levels of warmth toward Muslims in the New Zealand population. We describe the distribution of thermometer ratings of warmth toward Muslims annually from 2012 onward, and compare these with thermometer ratings of a range of other groups that we also track. We present a regression model documenting the extent to which a broad range of demographics and aspects of personality are associated with low levels of warmth toward Muslims, and present a parallel model assessing warmth ratings toward immigrants as a comparison. Finally, we present a series of growth curve models outlining the relative level and rate of change over time in warmth toward Muslims and other groups from 2012-2018. Results from these analyses indicate that over the 2012-2018 period, levels of warmth toward Muslims in New Zealand were comparatively low relative to warmth ratings of other groups. However, warmth toward Muslims has also been steadily but gradually increasing over time in New Zealand.