Complainant’s physical attractiveness and juristic judgments of blame and punishment in physical, domestic, and sexual assault scenarios

ABSTRACT

Extralegal factors, including physical attractiveness, may bias juristic opinions. The present study provided 450 university students with hypothetical scenarios of physical, domestic, and sexual assault in which complainant’s attractiveness and other legal and extralegal characteristics were independently varied. Results indicate complainant’s attractiveness mattered in sexual assault scenarios only for guilt of the defendant, but not for physical or domestic assault. Complainant’s attractiveness was not related to perceptions of blameworthiness of complainant or punishment of defendant. Overall, legal factors of injury level, prior offending, and intoxication mattered more than attractiveness or race of the victim. Implications are discussed.

Notes

¹ Research indicates that position or aspect of an image may impact viewers’ judgments (Hess et al., 2007; Kappas et al., 1994; Mignault and Chaudhuri, 2003). Moreover, smiling versus neutral expressions also has been found to impact viewers’ opinions and perceptions (Abel and Watters, 2005; Forgas, 1987; Forgas, O’Connor, and Morris, 1983; LaFrance and Hecht, 1995; Reis et al., 1990). Thus, images were built with these considerations in mind. This is one of the advantages of using software that allowed us to create avatars.

² Analyses were also conducted using missing imputation in Mplus version 7.4 (Muthèn and Muthèn, 1998-2015). The results for missing imputation found more significant effects for the students’ sociodemographic indicators but relatively similar results for the vignette variables. Results using missing imputation are available from the senior author upon request.

³ Diagnostics for negative binomial regression did not indicate a problem of overdispersion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Wareham

JENNIFER WAREHAM is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Wayne State University. She received her Ph.D. in Criminology from the University of South Florida. Her research focuses on juvenile justice and delinquency, intimate partner violence, and program evaluation.

Brenda Sims Blackwell

BRENDA SIMS BLACKWELL is a Professor and Department Chair of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Georgia Southern University. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Oklahoma. Her research examines the roles of sex and gender expectations in gender differences in delinquency and criminal justice processing.

Bonnie Berry

BONNIE BERRY, Ph.D., is presently the Director of the Social Problems Research Group and formerly university faculty. Her areas of research interest include appearance bias, animal rights, and all measures of social inequality. She is the author of several books and numerous research articles on a range of social problems topics. Her forthcoming edited volume is Appearance Bias and Crime to be published in 2018 with Cambridge University Press. She is the recipient of several professional awards, including the American Society of Criminology’s Herbert Bloch Award.

Denise Paquette Boots

DENISE PAQUETTE BOOTS is the Program Head and an Associate Professor of Criminology and Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Urban Policy Research at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her research agenda focuses on issues such as domestic violence and homicide, child abuse and neglect, capital punishment, gendered pathways to crime and victimization, parricide, and evaluations of problem-solving courts and criminal justice programs.