Psychological and Emotional Impact of Political Events on Immigrants

Collaborators:

Elif Erisen, Deniz Beste Akdogdu

---

Introduction

We aim to tackle the question "How do people make dispositional attributions for immigrants and natives?". Virtual Reality provides an immersive experience which is suitable for creating social environments to examine cognitive and behavioral processes. We investigate the connection between physiology (heart rate) and attitudes towards the actors, the specific traits attributed to the actors, and the perceived causal attribution of the actions.

---

Methodology

We used two actors in a VR setup, where a native participant observes an immigrant and a native actor. We will manipulate the heritage of the actor providing the verbal treatment, and control for the impact of perceptual salience by changing the actors' position in the VR setting in a factorial design experiment. Our primary objective is to determine if, in a negative scenario, individuals are more likely to make trait attribution rather than situational attribution to the immigrant compared to the native.