East Asian religious tolerance versus Western monotheist prejudice: The role of (in)tolerance of contradiction

Accumulated research has shown that Western Christian religiosity often predicts prejudice toward various kinds of outgroups. On the contrary, initial recent evidence indicates that East Asian religiosity predicts tolerance of various outgroups—except atheists. To understand these differences, we investigated cognitive (intolerance of contradiction) and emotional (disgust) mechanisms possibly mediating the link between religiosity and prejudice versus tolerance. In Study 1 (295 Westerners of Christian tradition), high disgust contamination and, to some extent, intolerance of contradiction mediated the relationship between religiosity and prejudice against ethnic (Africans), religious (Muslims), moral (homosexuals), and convictional (atheists) outgroups. However, in Study 2 (196 Taiwanese of Buddhist or Taoist tradition), religiosity was unrelated to disgust, and predicted low intolerance of contradiction, and thus tolerance of the same religious, ethnic, and moral outgroups—but still not of atheists. Cultural differences in cognition and emotion seem to explain East–West differences in religious prejudice.