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.

摘要

人们通常认为社会群体（例如种族群体、职业、性别群体）具有固定的成员资格和离散的界限。本文提出关于抽象犯罪概念的本质主义信念，作为自然定义和普遍连贯的，在罪责和量刑判断中发挥作用。在三项研究中，大学生的一般样本（研究 1，n  = 52）、从 MTurk 招募的非专业公共样本（研究 2，n  = 102）和从刑事司法教室招募的大学生样本（研究 3，n = 62) 阅读犯罪小插曲并做出罪责和量刑决定。我们通过使用适用的犯罪本质主义量表来衡量对犯罪类别的本质主义信念，假设本质主义倾向会预测更高的罪责等级和更严厉的惩罚。结果表明，非专业参与者总体倾向于支持本质主义陈述，他们的本质主义评级显着预测了相应罪行的罪责和量刑判决。相比之下，接受过刑事司法正规教育的学生对犯罪概念的本质主义思维明显较弱，他们的本质主义评级并不能预测罪责和量刑结果。