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Prejudice: You can be intolerant in three ways

4.9.2020

Translation: machine translated

Tolerance is characterised by granting other people the same rights and freedoms that you claim for yourself. This can fail in three ways.

Ban on headscarves, violence against Jews, double standards in dealing with animals. Is it all ultimately the same thing: an intolerant attitude? Social scientists led by Maykel Verkuyten from Utrecht University believe the label is too superficial. In surveys in several countries, they have identified three forms of intolerance.

The core of the first form is antipathy towards a group of people who are perceived as "different". This intolerance arises from narrow-mindedness, rigid thinking and a sense of threat, and it manifests itself in a feeling of superiority and discriminatory behaviour.

The second type of intolerance is the unthinking rejection of a group's beliefs or practices. Those who are guided by this intuitive intolerance tend to apply double standards, Verkuyten and his team explain. He and his colleagues discovered such a double standard in 38 per cent of Western Europeans, for example, in not accepting or rejecting similar Christian and Islamic practices equally. This does not necessarily have anything to do with prejudice, they write. Many have simply not given enough thought, for example, to the fact that there are good reasons to respect different customs. "Studies show that intolerance towards the practices of outgroups and a prejudiced attitude are two different phenomena."

What both have in common is not recognising other people and their rights to maintain their own beliefs and customs as equal.

Unquestioned intolerance

Social scientists understand the third form to be a kind of considered intolerance: the disapproval of practices after weighing up the arguments on both sides. When it comes to child abuse, the matter is clear. The behaviour deviates from accepted norms and values; tolerance is out of the question. In other cases, however, even considered intolerance is not immune to double standards. For example, there is a double standard when unnecessary suffering is condoned in animal husbandry but not in religious practices.

Verkuyten and one of his co-authors, Levi Adelman, found the various forms of intolerance in several samples in the Netherlands, among other places. "For some people, anti-Muslim feelings and disapproval of the practices go hand in hand, for others they do not," they conclude. The disapproval of individual practices is not proof of prejudice.

A non-prejudiced attitude can even be shown in the rejection of religious symbols in schools, for example - as long as they are all rejected, including those of one's own culture. Anyone who only disapproves of the religious symbols of minorities demonstrates intolerance. It is therefore possible that people with very different attitudes reject the same things. A phenomenon that could explain the strange communities of convenience at the demonstrations against coronavirus measures.

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