Term of Award

Summer 2021

Degree Name

Master of Science in Experimental Psychology (M.S.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (open access)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of Psychology

Committee Chair

Michael Nielsen

Committee Member 1

Amy Hackney

Committee Member 2

Daniel Gambacorta

Abstract

The underlying effect of religious bias towards Muslims has negatively impacted their chances of receiving equal employment opportunities. The current study attempts to observe this effect by having Christian participants pretend to be a boss of a company and asking them to evaluate a fictitious resume and rate the applicant on their suitability for the managerial job at hand. The applicants were either Christian or Muslim. Based on the justification-suppression model, we also attempted to observe the effect having different hiring qualifications had on the applicant ratings. To do this, applicants either had a high or low GPA, and they either had managerial or marketing work experience. Finally, we wanted to observe if the level of religiosity a participant had could impact their suitability scores. A 2x2x2 ANOVA was used to analyze the interaction of religion, GPA, and work experience, while two regression analyses were run for the Christian and Muslim applicant groups separately. The data did not support our first hypothesis, as the difference in suitability scores for Christian and Muslim applicants did not vary significantly. We were not allowed to test the justification-suppression model as the interaction of religion, GPA, and work experience was not significant. We also did not find support for an effect that level of religiosity impacted ratings. It should be noted that many participants had to be excluded due to not being Christian or not successfully passing attention checks. There was also a flaw in the methods that could have led to these results.

OCLC Number

1266278001

Research Data and Supplementary Material

No

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