The Motivation to Punish Offenders
Why do people favor punishing criminal offenders? Do we punish violators in order to incapacitate them so that they are unable to commit future violations or are we trying to instill fear to deter lawbreakers and other potential wrongdoers from engaging in these future criminal acts? Alternatively, we might incarcerate violators or sentence them to community corrections with the hope that programming in those institutions will rehabilitate offenders, change their psychological judgment strategies so that they voluntarily desist from criminal behavior. Our lab is engaged in a program of research that contributes to a body of research that has tried to answer these questions. Recently we conducted a series of studies that first measured participants’ self-reported punishment justifications (i.e., retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation) and then asked the participants to punish offenders. Our findings support retribution or “just deserts” as the chief motive that drives punishment judgments, which in turn predicted sentence severity judgments despite the fact that participants’ self-reported support for retribution as a justification showed no predictive influence.
Voting, Politics, and Emotion
There is no disagreement among political psychologists that partisanship influences American voting behavior but there are many political decisions when party leaders are either silent or disagree. Our lab is engaged in a program of research to examine the role of people’s emotional projections about the outcomes of policy decisions as a factor in determining how they vote. We take a policy capturing approach to model political judgment testing the roles of partisanship, forecasted emotions, and utilization of policy-relevant cues to predict support of policies that do not receive united support from either political party. Our work has found that when voters do not have clear direction from partisan affiliation, they turn to their emotional reactions to the policy as a source of guidance in their political judgment. Further while voters tend to be inconsistent in identifying which policy relevant cues they actually utilize, statistical analyses have supported a fast and frugal model in which only two cues most important to each voter successfully predicted voting outcomes. Continued work in this area will further examine how emotional reactions guide voter behavior on issues where partisan support is divided.
Juvenile Justice Research
Research has consistently demonstrated minority youth are treated unfairly within the juvenile justice system, yet little research has explored the psychology of juvenile probation judgments and the ways they contribute to disparate treatment. Our lab has conducted multiple experiments that explored how emotions that people feel toward juvenile offenders influence the way they make decisions about how the juvenile justice system should respond to the youthful offender. Among other results, we have found fearful participants who received no risk information about offenders were more likely to recommend a control-oriented supervision approach for a Black offender, but not a White offender. Fearful participants who received moderate risk information were not influenced by the offender’s race. Furthermore, when we increased the level of risk (high vs. low or moderate), participants relied on the risk information to make their decisions without reference to the race of the juvenile or their own emotional reactions to the youth. We plan to conduct additional studies to learn how people integrate information about juvenile offenders with the emotions that the offenders trigger in the evaluators especially with low risk youth.
Job Discrimination for Ex-offenders
The importance of stable housing for ex-offenders’ successful reentry into society cannot be overemphasized. Without stable housing people leaving prison have a difficult time finding employment, gaining access to social services, reuniting with their friends and families, and are more likely to recidivate. Therefore, the fact that criminal history reduces the willingness of housing authorities to rent to applicants is a decision-making problem that we have studied in our lab by documenting the stereotypes that community members hold about ex-offenders using Stereotype Content Model Analysis to map beliefs prior to asking participants to make rental judgments. In this paradigm, community members play the role of rental agents and decide whether they would rent to applicants with varying offense status, race and gender. We found, first, that people perceived released offenders as low in competence and warmth, second that the low competence stereotype diminished willingness to rent to ex-offenders, and third providing participants individuating competency information about specific applicants does not offset the influence of the generic stereotype that ex-offenders are low in competence. Our lab continues to be interested in this perplexing problem and is looking for ways to disrupt the stereotypes that people hold about ex-offenders.