Meaningful Interpersonal Contact: Interreligious Dialogue as a Response to the Cognitive and Social Dynamics of Bias

Abstract

Social and religious prejudices are a product of both “nature” and “nurture” and they have social and cognitive foundations, which are both biologically and culturally rooted. This chapter lays out the social and cognitive roots of religious and secular group prejudice and explores interreligious dialogue as a response to social prejudice and is an effort to promote collaboration across religious divides. An array of social, scientific, and psychological research has begun to demonstrate that cognitive biases and religious sectarianism are both outputs of cognitive and coalitional tendencies that helped our species survive in the past. The conditions for in-group preference and out-group negative bias are primed in the realms of cognitive functioning, social dynamics, and binding mechanisms such as religion. However, while out-group biases such as racism/xenophobia, classism, and sexism bring solidarity to the in-group in the form of a unifying “common enemy,” they are not a necessary part of a healthy, meaningful religious practice. Moreover, religious groups that practice interreligious dialogue and reach out to secular spheres are making a crucial contribution to the process of de-biasing and expanding the definition of the in-group to include communities across social, theological, ethnic, and nationalist divides. We argue that understanding these mechanisms—at work in our brains, society, and religious practices—is a crucial first step in “evolving” these tendencies to better fit with the diverse modern world. In particular, interreligious dialogue draws on two validated practices for de-biasing and expanding the definition of in-group, namely, self-awareness and meaningful interpersonal contact, offering a religious response to social diversity that carries a moral dimension and leverages the potency of religious community.