Judgments Of Culpability Research Articles

Personal and Collective Culpability Judgment

This research takes a functional perspective and examines the psychological processes underlying personal and collective culpability judgments in European Americans and Chinese in mainland China (Experiment 1), and in European Americans and Asian Americans (Experiment 2). Results indicate that when determining personal culpability for negative events, all three cultural groups consider behavioral causality. However, Chinese and Asian American participants tend to make more extreme collective culpability judgments than do European American participants. Furthermore, activating the goal of delegated deterrence strengthens Chinese and Asian American participants' collective culpability judgments only, whereas activating the goal of group harmony increases the strength of collective culpability in all three cultural groups. These findings suggest that collective culpability serves different functions in different cultural contexts.

Judgments of culpability in a filicide scenario

Previous research has indicated that potential jurors are likely to use personal biases, such as those based on gender and ethnicity, in their judgments of culpability of criminal defendants in addition to, or instead of, the facts of the crime. The present paper seeks to extend this literature to the crime of filicide; to examine whether male defendants are judged more harshly than female defendants, as is the case for domestic violence and sexual abuse. 214 participants were provided with a scenario of filicide in which the gender of the perpetrator, the gender of the child, and the family's social class were randomly assigned. Participants were asked to rate the culpability of the defendant in the case. Results indicated that, unlike for other violent crimes, participants did not use gender or social class biases in their judgments of criminal culpability.

Priming Crime and Activating Blackness: Understanding the Psychological Impact of the Overrepresentation of Blacks as Lawbreakers on Television News

Two experiments examined the extent to which U.S. viewers’ perceptions that Blacks face structural limitations to success, support for the death penalty, and culpability judgments could be influenced by exposure to racialized crime news. Participants were exposed to a majority of Black suspects, a majority of White suspects, unidentified suspects, and noncrime news stories. In addition, participants’ prior news viewing was assessed. In Study 1, heavy news viewers exposed to unidentified perpetrators were less likely than heavy news viewers exposed to noncrime stories to perceive that Blacks face structural limitations to success. In addition, heavy news viewers exposed to unidentified perpetrators were more likely than heavy news viewers exposed to noncrime stories to support the death penalty. In Study 2, participants exposed to a majority of Black suspects were more likely than participants exposed to noncrime stories to find a subsequent race-unidentified criminal culpable for his offense. In addition, heavy news viewers were more likely to exhibit the above effect than light news viewers. The methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed in light of chronic activation and the priming paradigm.

Schemas as Average Conceptions: Skin Tone, Television News Exposure, and Culpability Judgments

An experiment examined the extent to which race and skin tone of a perpetrator in a crime news story could influence subsequent culpability judgments of race unidentified suspects. There were no differences in culpability judgments between light news viewers exposed to a white, light-skinned, medium-skinned, or dark-skinned black perpetrator. However, heavy television news viewers exposed to a medium-skinned black perpetrator were more likely than heavy news viewers exposed to a white suspect to find an unambiguously guilty suspect culpable. Heavy news viewers exposed to either light-, medium-, or dark-skinned black suspects were more likely than heavy news viewers exposed to white suspects to find an ambiguously guilty suspect culpable.

The Influence of Gender and Ethnicity on Judgments of Culpability in a Domestic Violence Scenario

The Influence of Gender and Ethnicity on Judgments of Culpability in a Domestic Violence Scenario

Extra‐stimulus influences on eyewitness perception and recall: Hastorf and Cantril revisited

In a classic study by Hastorf & Cantril (1954), partisan relationships to the viewing of an American football game were shown to be related to personal judgments of culpability for on‐field offences. While this finding has been widely cited as evidence for unwitting, inherent distortion in eyewitness testimony, the study's original purpose and methodology were not congruent to such a claim. A study is presented which draws on the basic paradigm of the earlier work but which attempts to update its methodology with a view to considering the potential implications for eyewitness concerns. This modernized study found that notwithstanding the use of experimental procedures designed to eliminate intentional bias, participants' perceptions were still systematically distorted in favour of their preferred teams. In addition, the findings suggested not only that the participants were unaware that they had made biased judgments, but also, that they rationalized their perceptions with reasons which endorsed and consolidated the partiality of their viewpoints. The results are discussed in terms of the potential for such personally construed processing to influence eyewitness accuracy and the implications for future research.

In(de)terminable Intentions

Let me begin with a confession. When I see that the latest issue of a law journal contains a reply to an earlier article, I tend to be overcome with a mixture of irritation and fatigue. On the occasions on which I peruse the offending article, the effect is generally similar to that attributed by Emile Zola to a bedtime reading of the Code Civil. Such rejoinders rarely illuminate the basic issues which the original writer tried to address, and all too oiften consist in very detailed points which can only be grasped by a reader assiduous enough to return to the earlier text. When a reply is in turn met by a counter-reply, the reader frequently has the frustrating feeling that she is witness to what is essentially a private debate which has somehow found its way onto the public page. In the light of such a confession, I clearly owe MLR readers some explanation for inflicting a member of this doubly unfavoured species upon them. 1 Jeremy Horder's rejoinder to my article on intention is an unusual member of the genre.2 First, it gives a clear and (generally) fair statement of the portions of my argument with which it is concerned. Secondly, and more importantly, it raises some significant points about criminal law doctrine and scholarship in its own right. Indeed, it does not really constitute a 'reply' to my article, for in relation to the two main theses which I was advancing, Horder is, as far as I can tell, in partial agreement with one and does not address himself substantially to the other. What he does is quite properly to point out that the relevance of intention in criminal law is broader than I explicitly acknowledged. In doing so, however, he in fact considerably expands the terrain over which my arguments can be played out. The purpose of this comment, then, is both to acknowledge (with some modifications) the legitimacy of Horder's assertion of the multiple roles of intention in criminal law, and to show how that recognition fails to support the conclusions which he draws from it in relation to my argument. My aim is not so much to reiterate or defend my arguments (something which in any case would not be possible in the space which the MLR has generously accorded me) as to clarify the points of genuine difference between Horder and myself so as better to allow our readers to judge the relative merits of our positions. As Horder explains, the main purposes of my article were, first, to illuminate the ideological role of conceptions of intention in legitimating criminal legal practices and, second, to argue for a loosening of the boundaries between criminal law and criminal justice studies. I shall return briefly to this second point below, but as it is the first argument on which Horder concentrates, this will be my principal concern. In essence, Horder accuses me of focusing unjustiE1ably on only one of the roles of intention in criminal law that of grounding and shaping attributions of responsibility and judgments of culpability. He argues that intention has at least three other significant roles: constituting wrongs, protecting autonomy

Character, Choice and Moral Agency: The Relevance of Character to Our Moral Culpability Judgments

Should a person who cannot appreciate the moral significance of legal norms qualify as a blameworthy actor simply because he has the capacity to comply with them for non-moral reasons? Such a person may lack any empathy for other human beings and view moral norms as arbitrary restraints on his self-interested behavior: does he nevertheless deserve moral blame when he makes an instrumentally “rational choice” to breach a norm governing his action? Should our answers to these questions depend on whether we believe that the actor is morally responsible for lacking these moral emotions and understandings? In short, must we concern ourselves with those aspects of the agent's character – his goals, desires, values, emotions, and perceptions of what courses of action are available to him – that motivate his rational choices? Or are questions about what motivates the actor to exercise his capacity for rational choice irrelevant to our judgments concerning his moral culpability for violating some governing norm?One way of thinking about such questions is to ask what attributes a person must possess to qualify as an appropriate addressee of moral norms and a suitable object of moral blame. Must a moral agent have the capacity to respond to moral norms as a reason for his choices? Must he also be able to control those aspects of his character that impair his capacity to make moral choices?Most legal theorists insist that moral agents do not need such capacities to be fairly blamed for violating the minimal moral restraints that the criminal law imposes on their self-interested acts.

Psychological causality in the attribution of responsibility for rape

According to a legal model of the attribution of responsibility for rape, judgments of physical and psychological causality of an alleged rapist are combined into overall evaluations of attacker responsibility. It was hypothesized that observers evaluate psychological causality by reconstructing the thought patterns of the accused rapist and by classifying this mental activity along dimensions of responsibility. Subjects read crime briefs, rated dimensions of responsibility, and assigned sentences. Factor analysis and analyses of variance indicate that observers organize psychological causality of the rapist around dimensions of intended violence, and the extent to which the attacker's thoughts are attributable to the victim. Multivariate analysis of variance confirmed the expected effects of the attacker's thoughts on judgments of culpability.