Attitudes towards individuals with sexual convictions is an area with growing research interest, but the effects of such attitudes on professional judgments is largely unexplored. What is known from the existing literature is that attitudes guide the interpretation of sexual crime related information, which cascade into potential biased or heuristically driven judgments. In this study we recruited samples of both students (n = 341) and forensic professionals (n = 186) to explore whether attitudes towards individuals with sexual convictions predicted risk judgments of hypothetical sexual offense scenarios, and whether this relationship is moderated by professional status or perpetrator characteristics. Forensic professionals expressed more positive attitudes overall, but the significant effect of attitudes on risk judgments was consistent between participant groups and was not moderated by perpetrator age or sex. We suggest that relying on attitudes as a basis for risk judgments opens the door to incorrect (and potentially dangerous) decision-making and discuss our data in terms of their potential clinical implications. An open-access preprint of this work is available at https://psyarxiv.com/rjt5h/.

对有性信念的人的态度是一个研究兴趣不断增长的领域，但这种态度对职业判断的影响在很大程度上尚未得到探索。从现有文献中可知，态度指导着对性犯罪相关信息的解释，这些信息级联成潜在的偏见或启发式判断。在这项研究中，我们招募了学生（n = 341）和法医专业人员（n= 186）探讨对有性犯罪的个人的态度是否可以预测假设性犯罪情景的风险判断，以及这种关系是否受到专业地位或犯罪者特征的影响。法医专业人员总体上表达了更积极的态度，但态度对风险判断的显着影响在参与者组之间是一致的，并且不受犯罪者年龄或性别的影响。我们建议将态度作为风险判断的基础打开了错误（和潜在危险）决策的大门，并根据其潜在的临床意义讨论我们的数据。这项工作的开放获取预印本可在 https://psyarxiv.com/rjt5h/ 获得。