Abstract
People store mental representations of faces for various social categories (Dotsch et al., 2011). These mental representations can reflect biases regarding social groups. This two-part study first used the reverse correlation paradigm (Mangini & Biederman, 2004) to create images of the mental representations that Christian and Muslim Canadians have of Christian and Muslim faces. 20 Christian and 20 Muslim participants were presented with a two-image forced choice task – each image was the average of 60 neutral faces, overlayed with a randomly generated Gaussian noise pattern – and were asked in some trials to select the face that look Christian, or in other trials, Muslim. There were a total of four blocks, two for each religion, across two male and female blocks. The selected images were then averaged to create classification images (CIs) which are proxy images of mental representations of Christian and Muslim faces (Brinkman et al., 2017; Dotsch & Todorov, 2012). In the second part of the study, a new sample of 252 naive participants rated the CIs on several valenced characteristics (e.g., happiness, trustworthiness, warmth) and several demographic characteristics (e.g., gender and ethnicity) to probe the original participants’ attitudes towards Christians and Muslims. Regardless of the religious identity of the participants who generated the CI, Christian CIs were consistently rated more positively than Muslim CIs (ꭓ2’s > 55, p’s < 0.001). There was no such pattern for the demographic characteristics (ꭓ2’s > 7, p’s > 0.05). These results favour the idea that both Christians and Muslims have an implicit bias in favour of Christianity, the dominant religion in Canada, over ingroup bias.