When Hurt Heroes Do Harm: Collective Guilt and Leniency toward War-Veteran Defendants with PTSD

Abstract

Veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are at heightened risk for interfacing with the United States legal system as criminal defendants. Two experiments were used to test the hypothesis that American mock jurors would punish a veteran (vs. a civilian) with PTSD for a violent crime less harshly because of their own collective guilt (i.e., the guilt felt for the transgressions of one's in-group) about the veteran's suffering due to war. The participants were United States citizens recruited online (n = 174) who completed a mock-juror experiment involving a violent assault committed by either a veteran or a civilian with PTSD. As predicted, jurors were more lenient toward the veteran (vs. the civilian). For male mock jurors this was explained by their collective guilt for the veteran's war-related suffering. A second study experimentally induced individual and collective guilt about veteran defendants, finding that mock jurors (n = 533) who are less likely to share a salient in-group identity with the veteran (i.e., women, people with lower national identification with the United States) can be induced to feel the requisite guilt to exhibit leniency toward a veteran. Thus, veterans suffering from PTSD may receive more lenient punishment because they elicit a sense of collective guilt in legal decision-makers.

Key words:

• collective guilt
• jury decision-making
• punishment
• veteran

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Nicholas Schweitzer, Deborah Hall, and Charles Stone for their helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The collective-guilt questions were mistakenly preceded by the statement ‘Please answer the following questions concerning how you, as an individual, feel about one's own responsibility in fulfilling their civil obligations’. This could raise the concern that this sentence might have induced individual guilt and therefore explain the leniency seen in the collective-guilt condition. It is not believed that this is the case for several reasons. First, given that the participants in this condition read a lengthy passage inducing collective guilt and were then actually asked questions about themselves at the group level (i.e., ‘as an American’) it seems unlikely that the short statement included in error would induce individual guilt effectively. Second, if the statement had actually induced individual guilt effectively then this condition would represent both an individual and collective guilt induction and should have had a similar effect as the combined individual- and collective-guilt condition in the design. This was not the case, however, as the collective-guilt condition exhibits significantly greater leniency than the control condition, whereas the combined condition does not.