The data on Muslim attitudes toward Westerners also revealed a variety of negative views (see Figure 3). In the five majority-Muslim countries, as well as Nigeria, at least 40 percent of Muslims in the survey characterized Westerners as arrogant, violent, greedy, and immoral; meanwhile, relatively few said Westerners were generous or honest (see Figure 4). And Muslims in these countries were particularly likely to say Westerners were selfish—in all six, majorities suggested selfishness was common among people in Europe and the United States. Negative assessments of Westerners were fairly common across all six of these countries, although they were slightly more prevalent in Jordan and Indonesia. European Muslims were consistently less likely to associate negative characteristics with Westerners and were more likely to label them as generous and honest.

How might we compare the level of religious-cultural negativity among the various publics? One approach is to create an index based on the average country responses to each of the survey questions. We can justify this if the questions are conceptually and statistically interrelated. First, conceptually, we suggest that these questions each tap into a more general attitude, which we call religious-cultural negativity (RCN) and define as a low opinion toward social groups whose core religion-related social identity is perceived to be different from one’s own. Though “Western” is not an explicitly religious concept, being Western, as religion scholar Philip Jenkins has noted, is traditionally understood to be closely related to being part of what was formerly called Western Christendom. Being Muslim, is, of course, an explicitly religious identity.

Second, statistically, each of the seven variables has a highly significant correlation with each of the others. In other words, publics with negative views on one measure are also significantly likely to hold negative views on the other measures. However, the presence of these correlations is not sufficient statistical evidence to justify building an index based on these seven questions.

A statistical procedure called factor analysis provides a more thorough test of whether using the seven items to construct an index is statistically justified. When we include the seven items in a confirmatory factor analysis model using all the responses from the thirteen countries in our analysis, we find, as Figure 5 shows, that each question significantly relates to the common factor religious-cultural negativity (RCN), and that the model fits the data.

The results shown in the figure include cases where Muslim respondents gave their opinions of Westerners and where non-Muslims gave their opinions of Muslims. We conducted further tests and found that these questions continued to relate to a common factor when Muslim and non-Muslim respondents were analyzed separately.

These analyses provide strong evidence that the seven questions statistically related to a common factor.