128 4 indeed project their opinions onto politicians, irrespective of whether they are Muslim or non-religious. Figure 4 also shows that 62 percent of moderates expect non-religious politicians to favor same-sex adoption, whereas only 15 percent expect this of Muslim politicians. This difference is statistically significant and points to stereotyping on the part of voters with moderate attitudes towards same-sex adoption. In sum, pro- and anti-flankers tend to project their own opinions onto politicians while moderates more frequently stereotype Muslim politicians. Figure 4. Do voters stereotype or project? Because research suggests that people more readily project towards out-groups when they perceive being similar to those out-groups, I examined perceived similarity with people who practice Islam, amongst flankers and moderates. Figure 5 shows that perceived similarity to Muslims is low for all three groups: they all score below 5, the midpoint in the scale from 0 to 10. Upon examining the distribution in the histograms for each group, it becomes clear that the highest percentages of respondents within each flanker/moderate-group answered 0: they perceive themselves as being completely
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