Can Exposure to Celebrities Reduce Prejudice? The Effect of Mohamed Salah on Islamophobic Behaviors and Attitudes 

By: Ala Alrababah, William Marble, Salma Mousa, Alexandra Siegel

Abstract: Can exposure to celebrities from a stigmatized group reduce prejudice toward that group writ large? We estimate the causal effect of Mohammed Salah—a visibly Muslim soccer player— joining Liverpool Football Club on Islamophobia, using hate crime reports throughout England, 15 million tweets from British soccer fans, and a survey experiment of Liverpool F.C. fans. We find that hate crimes in Merseyside (home to Liverpool F.C.) dropped by 16% compared to a synthetic control, and Liverpool F.C. fans halved their rates of posting anti-Muslim tweets relative to fans of other top-flight clubs. Our survey experiment suggests that the salience of Salah’s Muslim identity enabled positive feelings toward Salah to generalize to Muslims more broadly. Providing real- world behavioral measures of prejudice reduction and experimental evidence from a naturalistic setting, our findings provide support for the parasocial contact hypothesis, indicating that positive exposure to outgroup celebrities can reduce prejudice.

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Professor Alex Siegel was featured in a new article, "A billion tweets suggest Trump rhetoric didn’t boost Twitter hate". The article explores the political discourse on social media and its influence in the past two presidential elections. 

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Dr. Siegel’s work uses original datasets of hundreds of millions of social media posts, text and network analysis, machine learning methods, and experiments to study mass and elite political behavior in the Arab World and other comparative contexts. Her research explores drivers and mitigators of intergroup conflict and intolerance, consequences of repression, and digital dimensions of conflict—including the spread of online hate speech, extremism, and disinformation. Her work has been published in the American Political Science Review. She is a Research Associate at NYU’s Social Media and Political Participation Lab and a member of Evidence in Government in Politics (EGAP). 

Dr. Siegel is a former Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former CASA Fellow at the American University in Cairo. She completed her PhD in Political Science at New York University in 2018 and holds a Bachelor’s in International Relations and Arabic from Tufts University. She is currently a Postdoctoral fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University. 

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