In the wake of a terrorist attack, do Americans’ attitudes toward Muslims decline?

Abstract

When a terrorist attack occurs, a natural response may be increased public concern about terrorism. But when a self-described Muslim perpetrates a terrorist attack, do negative attitudes toward Muslims also increase? If so, is this effect conditional on the nature of people’s past personal experiences with Muslims? We present natural experiment data based on a 2015 web-based survey of 2105 non-Muslims in the US, a survey that happened to span the terrorist attacks in Paris on 13 November and San Bernardino on 2 December. We thus test Americans’ feelings toward Muslims immediately before and after both an international and a domestic terrorist attack. We find that, although the attacks significantly affected Americans’ concerns about radicalism both in the US and abroad, they did not negatively affect Americans’ thermometer feelings toward Muslims in the aggregate—a null finding conditioned only slightly by the nature of past personal experiences with Muslims.