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Prejudice against veiled Muslim women: The role of right-wing authoritarianism and intergroup anxiety

A series of terrorist acts involving women in various parts of the world, including in Indonesia, allegedly perpetrated by radical Muslim groups, has reinforced stereotypes and created prejudice against veiled Muslim women. This study aims to explain the role of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and intergroup anxiety as antecedents of prejudice against veiled Muslim women. Using a crosssectional survey design, the study sample (N = 403) were residents of Surabaya, selected using accidental sampling. RWA, intergroup anxiety, and prejudice against veiled Muslim women were measured using a questionnaire, while the research hypothesis was analyzed using multiple regression. The results show that RWA and intergroup anxiety play significant roles in explaining prejudice against veiled Muslim women (R = 0.826; R2 = 0.682; F = 428.68; p <0.001), with the relative contribution of RWA and intergroup anxiety being 34% and 66% respectively. The results and implications of the study are discussed in detail. The theoretical implication of the research is that RWA and intergroup anxiety play roles as antecedents of prejudice against veiled Muslim women.


Introduction
Acts of terrorism, which are widespread phenomena, have occurred in various parts of the world, including the attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon Headquarters in the United States on 11 September 2011 (Berty, 2018); the Paris attack in November 2015 (Utomo, 2018); Surabaya City in Indonesia in May 2018 (BBC News, 2018a). In 2019, there were various other acts of terrorism based on religion in Indonesia, where the perpetrators were not only men but also women (Halim, 2019).
Even though the majority of the Indonesian population is Muslim, at 87.18% (BPS, 2013), the veiling of women has not been widely accepted. Terror incidents in several countries have resulted in veiled Muslim women, both in western countries and in Indonesia, being perceived as symbols of controversy, division, security threats, fundamentalism, and acts of terrorism (e.g., Garcia Yeste et al., 2020; Karunia & Syafiq, 2019;Rahman & Syafiq, 2017;Rasyid & Bukido, 2018;Soltani, 2016). However, such women are currently a minority group among the Muslim majority in Indonesia.
The stigma that grows in society regarding the free veil, with prejudice and nationalism shown against Muslim women who wear one. Some of the unpleasant treatment that veiled Muslim women have to endure includes being called thieves, having bottles thrown at them, and not being allowed get on buses because of their veil (BBC News, 2018b).
Prejudice is a negative attitude aimed at individuals who are part of certain social groups (Brown, 2010;Kite & Whitley, 2016;McFarland, 2010;Myers & Twenge, 2016;Nelson, 2016). Three aspects constitute prejudice (Cohrs et al., 2012), namely: 1) cognitive aspects of individual beliefs in social groups; 2) affective aspects related to individual emotional reactions to negative and positive influences, as well as certain emotions on social groups; and 3) the conative aspect, which is an individual's tendency to behave based on avoidance or approach as a form of individual response to social groups.
In terms of theory, there are several factors that influence prejudice (Abrams, 2010), namely values, social categorization, clarity, personality, and individual personality. Emotional reactions that arise and are generally not realized by individuals are another factor that can explain prejudice (Kite & Whitley, 2016;Nelson, 2016).
According to Allport (1954), personality is one of the factors which complements prejudice, one of which is right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) (McFarland, 2010). This is supported by research which states that RWA is a predictor of prejudice against social groups (e.g., (Choma et al., 2018;Crawford et al., 2016;Onraet et al., 2017). Myers and Twenge (2016) explain that authoritarian personality is the tendency of individuals to be obedient to authority and intolerant of other groups that have lower status. RWA explains the tendency of individuals to obey higher authorities, to be aggressive against outgroups, and to support pre-existing conventional regulations (Saunders & Ngo, 2017). When a group violates conventional regulated rules (for example, being gay), individuals with high RWA tend to be more aggressive against that group (Crawford et al., 2016). Altemeyer (1996)  And third, conventionalism is the tendency of individuals to support conventional rules or values that apply in society, especially when these regulations are fully supported by the authorities.
These three aspects were developed by Altemeyer (1996) based on nine characteristics of the authoritarian personality, namely: support for conventional rules, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, stereotypes and rigidity, power, cynicism, projectivity, unconscious emotional impulses, and sexual barriers (Saunders & Ngo, 2017).
Intergroup anxiety is felt by individuals when anticipating or interacting with individuals from different groups (Stephan, 2014). Through the person X situation approach, intergroup anxiety is an interaction between the individual (person) and the environment (situation) (Britt et al., 1996). Four antecedents contribute to increasing or reducing the level of intergroup anxiety, namely: 1) personality and individual characteristics; 2) attitudes and perceptions; 3) personal experience; and 4) situational factors (Stephan, 2014;Stephan & Stephan, 1985). These antecedents have a reciprocal relationship with intergroup anxiety, such as negative attitudes toward other groups or outgroups, causing intergroup anxiety. Likewise, the intergroup anxiety that arises when individuals interact with other groups will form negative attitudes towards group members. Intergroup anxiety has three aspects, namely: 1) the affective aspect, namely feelings of discomfort, anxiety, and pressure, which become a negative experience that leads to hostility; 2) cognitive aspects, in which individuals may judge that interactions between groups will lead to negative consequences; and 3) physiological aspects, resulting in individuals who feel intergroup anxiety to experience an increase in galvanic skin response (changes in the sweat glands in the skin), increased blood pressure, and an increase in cortisol levels (Stephan, 2014).
Prejudice will increase when society has many differences, such as ethnicity, religion, language, and political ideology, meaning social categorization becomes very prominent (Cohrs et al., 2012;Crawford et al., 2016). These prejudices can be caused by relationships that involve contact and interaction between groups, including emotions. When a social group has a warm and friendly impression of another group, positive emotions are created. Conversely, when a social group has a cold or unfriendly impression, this will create negative emotions (Irene & Ampuni, 2020;Kotzur et al., 2019;Seger et al., 2017). Stephan and Stephan (1985) introduced intergroup anxiety as an experience that causes uncomfortable feelings when interacting with outgroups.
Based on the above description, it can be concluded that RWA and intergroup anxiety are two of the many factors that according to theory can influence prejudice against veiled Muslim women. There have been various previous studies examining the relationship between RWA and prejudice. Through the meta-analysis by Sibley and Duckitt (2008) 71 previous studies, it was established that personality, including RWA, was correlated with prejudice. In addition, several studies have examined the relationship between intergroup anxiety and prejudice. The results show that intergroup anxiety was able to predict prejudice between groups (Banas et al., 2020;Choma et al., 2016;Visintin et al., 2017). However, we are not aware of any previous studies which have examined the roles of RWA and intergroup anxiety together on prejudice in the context of veiled Muslim women. Therefore, this study aims to examine the role of right-wing authoritarianism and intergroup anxiety in such prejudice.

Method
Design A quantitative method was employed, with a cross sectional survey design using a questionnaire to collect the data.

Participants and Procedure
The study participants (N = 403) came from various ethnic and religious backgrounds and lived in the city of Surabaya. They were selected from an infinite population with an accidental sampling technique. The participants were involved voluntarily and anonymously, completing a questionnaire distributed online via social media (WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, and Line). They were male and female, or did not state their gender. Their age range was 18-30, selected with the consideration that at such an age individuals have a clear identity and can distinguish groups according to the categories that belong to other group members (Abrams, 2010).

Instruments
In the study, three self-reported questionnaires were used to collect data related to the three research variables and the demographics, together with open-ended questions to enrich these data. The scale of prejudice against veiled Muslim women was based on the three aspects that form prejudice according to Cohrs et al. (2012), namely cognitive, affective, and conative aspects, which were adjusted to the target of prejudice, veiled Muslim women. Before being used, the measuring tool was first subjected to a content validity test process with a CVR (content validity ratio) by three panelists. The item was said to have good content validity if it met the requirements, namely a CVR Indeks of ≥ 0.5. The measuring instrument consisted of 18 items and was declared reliable following an internal consistency test using Cronbach's alpha formula, with α = 0.908. The cognitive aspects that The Intergroup Anxiety Scale. The Intergroup Anxiety Scale compiled by Stephan & Stephan (1985) was used. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient value of the scale was 0.896, making the measuring instrument reliable. The tool was modified to measure feelings of discomfort or anxiety as a form of individual response when interacting with veiled Muslim women. To this end, the participants were asked to imagine themselves to be the only people who had to interact with a group of veiled Muslim women (for example, chatting with them or doing work together). Furthermore, they were asked to provide the level of appropriateness of their responses when engaging in such interactions. This measuring instrument consisted of 14 items composed of three aspects, namely affective aspects, cognitive aspects, and physiological aspects. The affective aspect comprised five items, an example being "I feel accepted by veiled Muslim women" [α = 0.700]. The cognitive aspect consisted of six items; for example, "I am careful when interacting with veiled Muslim women" [α = 0.784]. Finally, the physiological aspect included three favorite items; for instance, "I feel my heart beating when I interact with Muslim women in the veil" (α = 0.895). The responses to the Intergroup Anxiety Scale were on a five-choice Likert scale, from 1 (very unsuitable) to 5 (very suitable).

Data Analysis
Descriptive analysis was used to describe the characteristics of the participants and the

Results
In Table 1, it can be seen that the study participants were in the age range of 18-30 (M = 20.9; SD = 1.9); the majority were women (74.2%); just over half (50.1%) were Muslim, 53.7% were Javanese, and 58.4% had no Muslim friends who were veiled.
Prior to the multiple regression analysis, intervariable correlation was performed using Pearson's Correlation ( Table 2). As a result, all the variables had a significant positive correlation.
Furthermore, the multiple regression analysis (

Discussion
The results of the study (Table 3) indicate that together RWA and intergroup anxiety play a significant role in predicting prejudice against veiled Muslim women. Furthermore, from the results of the coefficient of determination, or adjusted R 2 of 0.680, it is demonstrated that they explain the emergence of prejudice against veiled Muslim women by 68%. In other words, there are other factors beyond these two variables that can explain the remaining 32% of prejudice against Muslim women who wear the veil Furthermore, the multiple regression results (Table 4) indicate that RWA has a positive role in explaining prejudice against veiled Muslim women. The positive standardized beta value shows that the higher the RWA, the greater the prejudice. These results are in line with previous research which showed that RWA was positively correlated with prejudice (Imhoff & Bruder, 2014;Onraet et al., 2017).
The findings of this study support the theory that individual factors are able to predict prejudice (Cohrs et al., 2012;Kite & Whitley, 2016). As a social ideology, RWA is a strong factor in forming prejudice against groups that are considered to threaten customary values, social norms, and moral values (Crawford et al., 2016). Individuals who have high RWA tend to have a rigid mindset, are inflexible, do not like novelty, and do not want to consider different moral rules and values (Cohrs et al., 2012). Such individuals will categorize the veiled Muslim women group as an outgroup that deviates from conventional rules, namely an order of social life that is free from terrorism and the values of radicalism. This predisposition results in the emergence of a tendency to be more aggressive toward veiled Muslim women.
The description above is in line with the findings of this study (Table 2), that the authoritarian aggression aspect has the greatest correlation with prejudice. It explains the tendency of individuals to be aggressive towards groups that are considered to break the rules (Gordon, 2017). When individuals believe that veiled Muslim women are a social threat, are disobedient and violate conventional rules, this will increase prejudice against them.
Furthermore, from Table 4 it can be seen that intergroup anxiety plays a positive role in predicting prejudice against veiled Muslim women. This means that when individuals perceive veiled Muslim women as an outgoup, the higher their prejudice against these women. This result is in line with the research of Choma et al. (2018), who found that there was a positive correlation between intergroup anxiety and prejudice.
This explains that individuals feel anxiety before interacting with groups or people who have different cultures (Stephan & Stephan, 1985). This also applies to different racial and ethnic groups, as well as groups that have been stigmatized, such as veiled Muslim women.
Furthermore, individuals will feel anxious and uncomfortable when a certain group has a history of conflict, as well as veiled Muslim women, who are often associated with radical Muslims. This is supported by the results of this study, which show that compared to other aspects of intergroup anxiety, the affective aspect has the greatest correlation value with prejudice against veiled Muslim women. This aspect relates to unpleasant experiences felt by individuals and can lead to the emergence of prejudice (Stephan, 2014). When individuals feel anxiety and feelings of discomfort, individual prejudice against veiled Muslim women will also increase.
Based on the multiple regression results (Table 4), from the standardized beta value it can be seen that intergroup anxiety plays a greater role than RWA in forming prejudice against veiled Muslim women. Stated in terms of the effective contribution, intergroup anxiety contributed 45%, while RWA contributed 23.2%. In other words, this research shows that intergroup anxiety plays a bigger role than RWA as a social ideology in forming prejudice against veiled Muslim women.
In this study, the role of intergroup anxiety was greater than RWA in predicting prejudice against veiled Muslim women (Table 4). This was because stereotypes against veiled Muslim women, such as their being symbols of controversy, fundamentalism, and terrorist behavior (Garcia Yeste et al., 2020Karunia & Syafiq, 2019;Rahman & Syafiq, 2017;Rasyid & Bukido, 2018;Soltani, 2016), stimulate more the emergence of anxiety and feelings of threat compared to the aggressive response generated by RWA. In the relationship between groups, terrorism that is perceived as a threat to life will create stereotypes, prejudice, and even discrimination. The threat posed by acts of terrorism carried out by radical groups can be explained by terror management theory. The results of research by Greenberg and Kosloff (2008) show that strong awareness of death or mortality will raise or reinforce stereotypes and negative attitudes towards other groups who are seen as the source of such threats.
After the acts of terror that occurred in the United States on 9/11, the media began to report that Muslims were a radical group, resulting in many Western leaders at that time feeling threatened by Islamic symbols, including the veils worn by some Muslim women (Satiti, 2017).
During the New Order government in Indonesia, the wearing of the niqab was prohibited, especially in school environments (Wahidah & Nuranisah, 2020). A series of bomb incidents in Indonesia was conducted by terrorist groups. In the bombing of three churches in Surabaya on 11 May 2018 the perpetrators involved veiled Muslim women. The pattern of religious-based terrorism in Indonesia shows that the involvement of women has been increasing (Asiyah et al., 2020;Mulia, 2019). The way the media reports on these women further reinforces the stereotypes and negative attitudes of society towards them (Basante, 2019;Satiti, 2017). The interpretation of a situation and the emotions that arise in response to it can be predictors of prejudice against a group (Shepherd et al., 2018). This prejudice means veiled Muslim women often face discrimination, have no freedom, and have to survive under the Islamophobia that is felt by society (Hancock & Mobillion, 2019;Satiti, 2017). When individuals interpret an act of terrorism carried out by a group of radical Muslims, it generates anxiety and fear as a form of individual response to the situation. Therefore, it is not surprising that the findings of this study suggest that intergroup anxiety has a greater influence on prejudice against veiled Muslim women than RWA.
As shown in Table 1, there are two other factors that play a role in explaining negative attitudes or prejudice towards veiled Muslim women: the presence or absence of participants' female Muslim friends who are veiled. Those who did not have such friends had higher prejudice than those who did.
This result is in line with the intergroup contact theory, which proposes that positive contact Prejudice against veiled Muslim women ….
Another finding in this study is that there are differences in prejudice against Muslim women who wear the veil based on religion. From the data in Table 1, it can be seen that non-Muslim participants had a higher prejudice against such Muslim women than Muslim participants. Apart from more intensive and positive contact, there are two other reasons that can explain this finding. First, the bombing that took place in the city of Surabaya in May 2018 targeted three churches, and one of the perpetrators was a veiled Muslim woman. Therefore, it is not surprising that the prejudice of Christian participants is higher than that of Muslims. Second, in general, compared to participants of other religions, Muslim ones had more comprehensive knowledge about the use of the niqab in Islam. The results of research by Zagefka et al. (2017) show that intergroup contact and knowledge influence intergroup contact and prejudice between groups.
Through direct contact experience with veiled Muslim women, a more positive attitude will be built, because intergroup contact can change negative stereotypical perceptions (Kotzur et al., 2019;Kotzur & Wagner, 2021). The stereotype of veiled Muslim women that underlies prejudice is a belief bias due to inaccurate overgeneralization (Brown, 2010;Jones et al., 2014;Nelson, 2016).
Based on the findings of this research, a reduction in the prejudice against Muslim women who are veiled or other outgroups, could be achieved by reducing RWA and intergroup anxiety. The basic aspects that constitute RWA are authoritarian parenting styles and socialization, namely by modeling through parents and friends, the media, and the presence of situational factors (Kandler et al., 2016;Saunders & Ngo, 2017). To reduce RWA, individuals could model tolerant behavior towards veiled Muslim women through friends or the media. Furthermore, intergroup anxiety in individuals also needs to be reduced in order to lessen prejudice against veiled Muslim women. Lack of knowledge about outgroups, lack of contact with outgroups, and worries about the emergence of negative behavior affect the levels of intergroup anxiety (Britt et al., 1996;Stephan & Stephan, 1985). Therefore, increasing knowledge about veiled Muslim women, such as their relevant norms and moral values, could reduce intergroup anxiety. Involvement in positive direct interactions could also have the same effect. From the veiled Muslim group who joined the Niqab Squad community, socialization through the media was an effort to reduce intergroup anxiety, which in turn reduced prejudice against veiled Muslim women (Idntimes, 2019).

Conclusion
Based on the results and discussion, it can be concluded that RWA and intergroup anxiety together play a role in predicting prejudice against veiled Muslim women. The stronger these are, the stronger negative attitudes towards such women. Intergroup anxiety plays a greater role in predicting prejudice than RWA because of the strengthening of stereotypes that stem from the perceived anxiety and threat of veiled Muslim women.

Suggestion
The research was conducted in Surabaya, so the results cannot be generalized to populations with different characteristics. For this reason, similar studies could be conducted with different populations, by selecting participants proportionally and by considering demographic characteristics such as gender and ethnicity by making contact with outgroups and religion as moderator variables.
In practice, to reduce prejudice against a minority group, it is beneficial to increase the