%0 Journal Article
%T ¡°Terrorist¡± or ¡°Mentally Ill¡±: Motivated Biases Rooted in Partisanship Shape Attributions About Violent Actors
%A Agostino Mazziotta
%A Birte Siem
%A Masi Noor
%A Nour Kteily
%J Social Psychological and Personality Science
%@ 1948-5514
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/1948550618764808
%X We investigated whether motivated reasoning rooted in partisanship affects the attributions individuals make about violent attackers¡¯ underlying motives and group memberships. Study 1 demonstrated that on the day of the Brexit referendum pro-leavers (vs. pro-remainers) attributed an exculpatory (i.e., mental health) versus condemnatory (i.e., terrorism) motive to the killing of a pro-remain politician. Study 2 demonstrated that pro-immigration (vs. anti-immigration) perceivers in Germany ascribed a mental health (vs. terrorism) motive to a suicide attack by a Syrian refugee, predicting lower endorsement of punitiveness against his group (i.e., refugees) as a whole. Study 3 experimentally manipulated target motives, showing that Americans distanced a politically motivated (vs. mentally ill) violent individual from their in-group and assigned him harsher punishment¡ªpatterns most pronounced among high-group identifiers
%K terrorism
%K mental illness
%K attributions
%K punitiveness
%K motivated reasoning
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1948550618764808