Attribution bias in the context of intergroup relations: The case of natives and immigrants

Ultimate attribution error (UAE) is the tendency to attribute negative outgroup behavior to disposition factor and negative ingroup behavior to external circumstances. This study investigates the UAE committed by Turkish individuals in the context of intergroup relations between Syrian immigrants and Turkish citizens in. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of the other's out-group status and perceptual salience on the UAE. We intended to investigate these effects using a Virtual Reality configuration with virtual agents of a Turkish national and a Syrian immigrant. We hypothesized that Turkish citizens will make more dispositional attributions toward the Syrian immigrant agent in a negative scenario. Plus, the perceptually salient agent is expected to be attributed with more causality about the conversation and more dispositional. Results on the UAE yielded a significant interaction effect of Salience and Ethnicity. For the Syrian agent in a negative scenario, being visually salient resulted in higher ratings for the attribution of the negative behavior to personal decision. For the condition that Turkish agent is talking about a negative behavior, when Syrian agent is salient, the ratings for the same question were higher than the condition that Syrian agent is talking about a negative behavior, when Turkish agent is salient. Emotional and physiological (heart rate) reactions were also assessed, but yielded no significant results. This study contributes to the social and political psychology and cognitive science research by investigating both the perceptual salience and negative behavior effects in the context of ethnicity in VR environment.