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

We regret that there was an error in one of the footnotes and the appendix of our recently published article: “Can Exposure to Celebrities Reduce Prejudice? The Effect of Mohamed Salah on Islamophobic Behaviors and Attitudes.”

Alrababa’h et al. (2021) write in Footnote 9: “Some may object to the hate crimes analysis because only about 39% of hate crimes targeted Muslims (see Appendix A).” Appendix A then explains this statistic: “the Home Office reports that 76% of hate crimes perpetrated from January 2017 to January 2018 were religiously or racially motivated. Of these crimes, 52% were categorized as anti-Muslim (BBC News 2018).” We initially calculated the 39% statistic by taking 52% of 76% (the percentage of hate crimes were racially or religiously motivated). However, we should have instead calculated 52% of just religiously motivated hate crimes.

The appendix should therefore instead read: “Of religiously-motivated crimes, 52% were categorized as anti-Muslim in particular (BBC News 2018).” Religious hate crimes represent 9–22% of hate crimes nationwide as reported by two official sources, the Home Office’s 2017–18 hate crime report (U.K. Home Office 2018) and the 2017–18 to 2019–20 Crime Survey for England and Wales (U.K. Home Office 2020), respectively. This suggests that anti-Muslim attacks make up 4–11% of recorded hate crimes, rather than 39%. Footnote 9 should therefore read: “Some may object to the hate crimes analysis because a minority of hate crimes target Muslims (See Appendix A).” Official statistics likely underestimate the true anti-Muslim hate crime rate, however, both because some hate crimes go unreported and because some crimes which are classified as solely racial may also be anti-Muslim in nature.