Essentialist thinking predicts culpability and punishment judgments

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Essentialism
• crime
• culpability
• sentencing
• expertise

Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Peter K. Manning, Dr. Rebecca Cudmore and Dr. Steven Zane for their generous support in distributing survey materials in their criminal justice classes. We thank Alix Alto, Kashfa Ahmed, Tess Forton, Gabriella Acosta Lane and Julia Hurley for their help developing and coding the study materials.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The data that support the findings of these three studies are available from the corresponding author upon request.

2 A detailed list of the study materials used is available from the corresponding author upon request.

3 Data of Study 2 were collected in a chronologically later order than Study 3. We presented the paper in the current order based on the theoretical structure of the three experiments.