São Paulo – The Immigration Policy Lab, an international research group affiliated with the United States’ Stanford University and with Switzerland’s University of Zurich, decided to look into how exposure of celebrities from stigmatized demographics can affect prejudice.
To that end, four researchers picked the case of Egyptian soccer player Mohamed Salah, who’s increasingly popular and a self-professed Muslim. They cross-referenced data regarding Islamophobic episodes surrounding the team Salah plays for – Liverpool F.C. of England. The player got hired in 2017, and his team was crowned winner of the European Champions Cup last weekend.
The study points out that awareness of Salah’s religion may have led to a decline in prejudice against Islam. “Our findings indicate that positive exposure to outgroup role models can reveal new information that humanizes the outgroup writ large,” reads the study, which came out on May 30.
The first analysis in the study was based on 936 hate crime observations and on hate crime data from 25 police departments across England from 2015 to 2018. Also considered were 15 million tweets by English soccer fans, and a survey covering 8,060 Liverpool fans. Researchers realized that Merseyside county, which is home to Liverpool F.C., saw a 18.9% drop in hate crimes, while “no similar effect was found for other types of crime.”
“We also find that Liverpool F.C. fans halved their rates of posting anti-Muslim tweets (a drop from 7.2% to 3.4% of tweets about Muslims) relative to fans of other top-flight English soccer clubs,” the study reads.
Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum