Mindsets of criminality: predicting punitive and rehabilitative attitudes

ABSTRACT

Should the goal of criminal justice be to make sure offenders get their ‘just deserts’? In the current work, we investigate why some people believe that criminal offenders should be punished. The primary goal is to explore how mindsets about the nature of criminal behavior predict punitive and rehabilitative attitudes. Drawing on the Double-Edged Sword (DES) model of mindsets in stigmatized domains, we predicted that mindsets about the relative changeability (growth mindsets) or stability (fixed mindsets) of criminality will have contradictory indirect effects on these attitudes. Across three preregistered studies (N = 1,089), in addition to finding that growth mindsets overall predicted less punitive attitudes, we found support for the DES model. That is, growth mindsets indirectly predicted less punitive and more rehabilitative attitudes via reduced essentialist thinking but stronger punitive and weaker rehabilitative attitudes via greater blame. Our findings extend the DES model to the domain of criminality, suggest avenues for additional research, and offer applications for fostering growth mindsets that keep the benefits without the costs.

KEYWORDS:

• Mindsets
• criminality
• punishment
• rehabilitation
• criminal justice

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/c72b6/, https://osf.io/c72b6/ and https://osf.io/c72b6/registrations.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Our preregistrations primarily focused on punitive attitudes, however, we also measured and report on rehabilitative attitudes.

2 We provide additional details about this link between political ideology, mindsets, and punitive and rehabilitative attitudes in our supplemental material.

3 The pre-registered numbering system included the pilot study, thus Studies 2 and 3 are noted as 3 and 4.