Muslim = Terrorist? Attribution of violent crimes to terrorism or mental health problems depend on perpetrators’ religious background

ABSTRACT

The present work investigates whether the assumed religious background of a perpetrator in a carried out (Study 1) and attempted mass shooting (Study 2) influences attribution of the crime to mental health problems or terrorist motives as well as to evaluation of appropriate punishment. In two experimental studies (n =  113 and n =  340) participants were confronted with a scenario depicting an (attempted) mass shooting that was either carried out by a perpetrator with a German or an Arabic/Muslim name. Results indicate that compared to a perpetrator with a German name, a shooting carried out by a perpetrator with an Arabic/Muslim name led to increased attributions to a terrorist motive and fewer attributions to mental health problems. Moreover, in Study 2, this attribution pattern was accompanied by increased punitiveness. The findings are discussed against the background of previous work showing comparable results as well as practical implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic bias
• terrorism
• mental health
• attribution

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Johanna Bauernschmidt, Nina Dolz, and Felix Wentzien for their help with data collection. I would also like to thank Stephen Foose, Cynthia Willis-Esqueda and to anonymous reviewers for their comments on a previous version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/569W4 and https://osf.io/mqye3.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/569W4 and https://osf.io/mqye3.

Notes

1. Mohammad is an Arabic name which is very frequent among men from Muslim families. Although it is likely that German non-immigrant participants in the studies perceive the name as Muslim, and therefore as the name of a religious outgroup, it might also be the case that Mohammad is primarily perceived as the name of an ethnic outgroup member. In other words, in this study it is not possible to disentangle the ethnic and religious identity of the perpetrator in the respective experimental condition. However, this shortcoming is relatively unproblematic given that previous work shows that for ethnic and religious majority members in Germany perceptions of religious and ethnic outgroup categories strongly overlap (Asbrock et al., 2014). Most importantly, compared to the typical German name Martin, Mohammad should, in any case, be considered as the name of religious or ethnic outgroup member.

2. Please note that according to the guidelines of the Federation of German Psychologists Associations studies involving interaction or intervention with human subjects do not necessarily need ethical approval by an institutional review board. The review board at the author’s institution recommends ethical approval for studies with clinical or minor samples, studies including high risks for participants (e.g., studies including invasive methods or pharmacological treatment), and studies gathering identifiable information, and/or studies with severe deception. None of these criteria is met in the research at hand. Given that the news articles in both studies were presented as fictitious, I do not consider the cover story as a severe deception. Participants only received incomplete information about the nature of the study – the study was framed as a study on personality characteristics and punitiveness. Please also note, that the data management strategy for the present study was approved by the institution’s data security officials.

3. Note that besides a non-significant effect for punishment in Study 2 results for full samples are largely similar to the results for the reduced samples in both studies (see Supplemental Material at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/569W4).

4. In addition, two items measuring the perpetrator’s legal culpability were presented. Items were included to pursue additional exploratory research questions. However, results are beyond the scope of this article and are not reported in this manuscript (same is true for items measuring right-wing-authoritarianism).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Mathias Kauff

Mathias Kauff is professor for social psychology at the Medical School Hamburg, Germany. His research interests include intergroup relations, prejudice and discrimination, attitudes towards diversity, and intergroup contact.