TY - JOUR
T1 - Essentialist thinking predicts culpability and punishment judgments
AU - Xu, Yian
AU - Berryessa, Colleen M.
AU - Dowd, Mackenzie
AU - Penta, Darrell
AU - Coley, John D.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - People often perceive social groups (e.g. ethnic groups, occupations, gender groups) as having fixed membership and discrete boundaries. This paper proposes that essentialist beliefs about abstract crime concepts, as naturally defined and universally coherent, play a role in culpability and sentencing judgments. In three studies, a general sample of college students (Study 1, n = 52), a lay public sample recruited from MTurk (Study 2, n = 102), and a sample of college students recruited from criminal justice classrooms (Study 3, n = 62) read crime vignettes and made culpability and sentencing decisions. We measured essentialist beliefs about crime categories by using an adapted essentialism scale for crimes, hypothesizing that essentialist tendencies would predict higher culpability ratings and harsher punishments. Results showed that lay participants had an overall tendency to endorse essentialist statements, and their essentialist ratings significantly predicted culpability and sentencing judgments with regards to the corresponding crimes. In contrast, students with formal education in criminal justice showed significantly weaker essentialist thinking about crime concepts, and their essentialist ratings did not predict culpability and sentencing outcomes. The current findings provide new evidence regarding how essentialist thinking and subject matter knowledge frames lay understandings about crime concepts, and how such intuitive beliefs may systematically influence legal judgments.
AB - People often perceive social groups (e.g. ethnic groups, occupations, gender groups) as having fixed membership and discrete boundaries. This paper proposes that essentialist beliefs about abstract crime concepts, as naturally defined and universally coherent, play a role in culpability and sentencing judgments. In three studies, a general sample of college students (Study 1, n = 52), a lay public sample recruited from MTurk (Study 2, n = 102), and a sample of college students recruited from criminal justice classrooms (Study 3, n = 62) read crime vignettes and made culpability and sentencing decisions. We measured essentialist beliefs about crime categories by using an adapted essentialism scale for crimes, hypothesizing that essentialist tendencies would predict higher culpability ratings and harsher punishments. Results showed that lay participants had an overall tendency to endorse essentialist statements, and their essentialist ratings significantly predicted culpability and sentencing judgments with regards to the corresponding crimes. In contrast, students with formal education in criminal justice showed significantly weaker essentialist thinking about crime concepts, and their essentialist ratings did not predict culpability and sentencing outcomes. The current findings provide new evidence regarding how essentialist thinking and subject matter knowledge frames lay understandings about crime concepts, and how such intuitive beliefs may systematically influence legal judgments.
KW - Essentialism
KW - crime
KW - culpability
KW - expertise
KW - sentencing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85103372383&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85103372383&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/1068316X.2021.1905812
DO - 10.1080/1068316X.2021.1905812
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85103372383
SN - 1068-316X
VL - 28
SP - 246
EP - 267
JO - Psychology, Crime and Law
JF - Psychology, Crime and Law
IS - 3
ER -