Interreligious education in the context of Social Psychology research on attitudes and prejudice

Since the mid-1990s, interreligious education has become an integral component of thereligious education debate. Regardless of the affective level that interreligious education seeksto provide, the desired changes in attitude and prejudice require one to take into account adiversity of research on attitude and prejudice. Accordingly, the goal of the present article is toencourage the adoption of psychological theories of prejudice with a view to the prospectsthey offer to interreligious education. However, because the field of psychological prejudiceresearch is complex, we will only be discussing those theories that, firstly, reflect the presentstate of prejudice psychology and, secondly, are of particular relevance to interreligiouseducation; these are cognitive theories (accentuation theory, illusory correlation theory,attribution theory), the social identity theory, and social learning theory. Emanating from thisreview, the article will go on to reflect different strategies of attitude change for interreligiouslearning.