Ask and you shall receive? Right-wing authoritarianism shapes reactions to religious accommodation requests at work

Abstract

Religious accommodation in the workplace remains a contentious issue in the United States. We conducted an experiment to examine how individual differences in right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) shape how people react to religious accommodation requests from Muslim versus Christian employees. Results reveal that participants exhibited more bias toward employees requesting religious accommodations when compared to employees requesting secular accommodations, but RWA determined which religion was stigmatized more: raters high in RWA stigmatized Muslims more heavily for requesting religious accommodations, but raters low in RWA stigmatized Christians more heavily for the same request. These results are consistent with the ideologically objectionable premise model (IOPM) of prejudice, demonstrating that those with both high and low RWA can exhibit symmetrical biases toward religious practices that are not aligned with their values. We discuss the implications of these findings for future scholarship on authoritarian traits.