Occupational Status, Impression Formation, and Criminal Sanctioning: A Vignette Experiment

Why Does Occupational Prestige Affect Sentencing Outcomes?: Exploring the Perceptual Mediators

“…We sought to address this gap by using ACT and its computer simulation program, Interact , to derive predictions for how offender impressions should affect sentencing outcomes, building on our earlier work (Kroska & Schmidt, 2018). Drawing on ACT simulations, we predicted that occupational prestige would increase punitiveness and that it would do so through post-crime impressions of offender potency.…”

“…We examine these hypotheses using several methodological features that go beyond other experimental tests of occupational prestige on sentencing (Kroska & Schmidt, 2018; Loeffler & Lawson, 2002). First, our vignettes feature five occupations and two workplaces: A health care setting with a doctor, nurse, or receptionist offender and a business setting with a CEO, accountant, or receptionist offender.…”

“…Both theories rely on stereotype studies to predict which attributes will elicit the strongest perceptions of criminality and danger, but the researchers testing these theories have not—from what we can see in this literature—identified studies consistently linking SES-related attributes with those perceptions, leaving them with little basis for predicting how those attributes will affect sentencing decisions. Furthermore, the empirical work on the link between SES-related attributes and sentencing outcomes is mixed (Kroska & Schmidt, 2018), leaving analysts with no clear empirical patterns to draw on when advancing hypotheses. Thus, as we explain below, we use affect control theory to develop our hypothesis.…”

“…We derived hypotheses for our 2018 vignette experiment (Kroska & Schmidt, 2018) by using Interact simulations to determine the vignette characters’ relative criminality scores. We used the U.S. female sentiments collected in the early 2000s (Francis & Heise, 2006) and the female 1978 equations that are in Heise’s (1997) version of Interact .…”

“…In a previous study (Kroska & Schmidt, 2018), we sought to address this gap by using affect control theory (ACT), a theory of impression-formation processes, to develop a hypothesis for this relationship. Our ACT-derived hypothesis suggested that high-prestige perpetrators would appear more potent than low-prestige perpetrators after committing a crime and that those heightened perceptions of potency would increase perceptions of danger and criminality.…”