The House Article | The Professor Will See You Now: The Mo Salah effect

Illustration by Tracy Worrall

4 min read18 May

What did you think when you heard that Mo Salah was leaving Liverpool? Me, I wondered what it meant for the parasocial contact hypothesis.

Before you conclude I need to get out more, let me explain.

The idea that personal contact with people who are different – ‘out-groups’ in the lingo – can change attitudes has a long heritage; the ‘parasocial contact hypothesis’ is that indirect, mediated, contact – with celebrities, television characters and so on – has a similar effect.

Salah joined Liverpool in 2017, for what was then a club record fee. He helped them win the Champions League in 2019 and the Premier League in 2020. And in 2021, a fascinating paper published in the American Political Science Review examined the effect that having an elite player with what it called “conspicuous Islamic identity” had on Liverpool fans – and whether it reduced levels of Islamophobia.

In this case, it seems it does. After Salah’s arrival, researchers found that Liverpool fans became less likely to send anti-Muslim tweets when compared to other fans, at about half the expected rate. They also found levels of hate crime in Merseyside dropped by 16 per cent, again when compared to the expected rate. The authors concluded that “positive exposure to out-group celebrities can spark real-world behaviour changes in prejudice”.

Up to a point, at least. Because as I have said occasionally in this column before: size matters.

Take, for example, the third part of the study, in which researchers compared responses from Liverpool fans who were explicitly reminded of Salah’s religion with those who are not. The study tested three different views of Islam. In two cases, the differences were not statistically significant. In the third, when asked whether they thought Islam was compatible with British values, the primed respondents were more positive, and by an amount that was statistically significant, up by five percentage points.

To be fair, we might not expect great differences here. If the whole justification for studying responses to someone is that their identity is conspicuous, pretty much everyone should be primed already. But still, even that five per cent increase only gets you to 23 per cent. In other words, even after he’d helped them win all that silverware, the vast majority of respondents to the survey still thought Islam wasn’t compatible with British values. It’ll take a few more Salahs before that changes; and there is – in the words of the song – only one.

There are also two obvious follow-on questions. What about Liverpool’s (ahem) patchier form in some of the following seasons? A study of the Israeli football team in 2020, for example, found that when the national team were winning, the Arab players in the team were praised – but that didn’t last when things went south. To what extent do we think this effect is dependent upon performance? And second, and perhaps most important, will any effect survive Salah’s departure? The only person to have thrice been crowned PFA Players’ Player of the Year has his last game for Liverpool later this month. How long-lasting do we think any parasocial contact effect will be?

You want more Liverpool? Try Florian Foos and Daniel Bischof’s study of the effect that the boycott of the Sun had on attitudes towards the EU; they estimate the leave vote there to be around eight to nine percentage points lower as a result. Or David Jeffery’s book on the transformation of the Conservatives fortunes in the city. In the 1968 local elections, the Conservatives won almost 80 per cent of council seats; today, zero. A book examining what causes dramatic changes in local government fortunes sounds topical. 

A Alrababa’h et al, Can Exposure to Celebrities Reduce Prejudice? The Effect of Mohamed Salah on Islamophobic Behaviors and Attitudes, American Political Science Review (2021); F Foos and D Bischof, Tabloid Media Campaigns and Public Opinion: Quasi-Experimental Evidence on Euroscepticism in England. American Political Science Review (2022); D Jeffery, Whatever Happened To Tory Liverpool (2023)