Collective Efficacy as the Conditional Effect of the Relationship between Religiocentrism and Support for Interreligious Violence

When a person identifies with a particular religion, they identify not only with the ingroup’s religious values but also with the ingroup’s evaluations towards the relevant religious outgroup. Using a theoretical notion of ethnocentrism, this study offers religiocentrism to explain how one favourably perceives their religious affiliation and unfavourably evaluates the religious outgroup. Specifically, this study is focused on the recent interreligious conflicts between Muslims and Christians in Indonesia. In carrying out the study, we employ relevant constructs to test our hypothesis that religiocentrism is indirectly related to support for interreligious violence via perceived injustice and that this relation is stronger for individuals with high collective efficacy. We perform a confirmatory factor analysis to test all the measures’ validity. In testing the hypothesis, we conduct a moderated mediation analysis to test the indirect relations between religiocentrism and support for interreligious violence via perceived injustice and to test the conditional effect of collective efficacy on the relationship. The results show that collective efficacy significantly moderates the relation between religiocentrism and support for interreligious violence. The finding contributes to the discussion of the various roles of collective efficacy in interreligious conflicts, dependent on the nature of the conflicts.