Negative Evaluations of National Ethics and Its Impact on Islamic Radicalism

Abstract

This research set out to examine the role of negative evaluations of national ethics in escalating Islamic radicalism. To this end, we conducted three studies among samples of Muslims in Indonesia. In Study 1b involving 610 participants, we tested in an explorative way the latent structure or the number of dimensions of negative evaluations of national ethics reflecting the perceived immorality, illegitimacy, and inefficiency of national ethics based on participants’ religious beliefs. We confirmed the number of dimensions of the negative evaluations of national ethics in Study 2 ( N = 214), which also showed as expected how they augmented feelings of in-group superiority and tendencies to justify violence. These radical beliefs ultimately evoked intentions to carry out unlawful collective actions and offensive Jihad, negative intergroup attitudes such as out-group blame and negative group-based emotions such as anger. We also observed in Study 2 how the acknowledgment or awareness that Islam and the nation are of equal importance to the Indonesian context, which we referred to as dual identity centrality, explained fewer negative evaluations of national ethics. In Study 3, we recruited 583 participants through an online experiment devised as an intervention that proved significant for the enhancement of dual identity centrality. Designed as an extension of Study 2 in which radical beliefs were complemented with radical thoughts such as dogmatic intolerance, Study 3 also demonstrated that each of those radical tendencies significantly contributed to negative group-based attitudes and emotions, as well as motivations to engage in violent actions. What can be derived from these empirical findings is that dual identity centrality holds potential for reducing the negative evaluations of national ethics, which in turn may overcome Islamic radicalism along with its detrimental intergroup consequences.