Abstract
We hypothesized that perceived intentionality is one of the factors explaining why terrorism is perceived to be a more important problem than traffic accidents. In Study 1, we conducted an experiment on a large Turkish sample (N = 385) and found that participants suggested allocating significantly more budget to prevent terror-related deaths, as compared to deaths caused by traffic accidents, and this difference was fully mediated by perceived intentionality. In Study 2, which was pre-registered, we hypothesized that American participants (N = 450) would similarly suggest allocating more budget to prevent deaths caused by terrorist incidents, as compared to traffic accidents, but this difference would disappear when traffic accidents are portrayed as involving a perpetrator consciously disregarding the safety of others. Our hypothesis was partially supported. We discuss the potential implications for policy-makers and social psychological research.
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Notes
Ten participants did not indicate their ideology which resulted in N of 376 for analyses of covariance.
As participants recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk will likely to be living in different cities, we chose not to mention any detail on the location.
This mediation analysis was not included in the preregistration. We initially planned to only manipulate perceived intentionality, but then reasoned that performing the same mediation analysis on data collected from a distinct culture would provide valuable insight regarding the reproducibility of our key finding.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the ethical approval board of Department of Psychology at Baskent University and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Data, materials, and analysis scripts for Study 1 and 2 are available at https://osf.io/j69qb/?view_only=633d9729f58c4a58bc5f6cb10e367453
Preregistration form for Study 2 is accessible at https://osf.io/yqbhx/register/565fb3678c5e4a66b5582f67
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Alper, S., Us, E.Ö. The role of intentionality in perceiving terrorism as a more important problem than traffic accidents. Curr Psychol 40, 4063–4071 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00372-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00372-0