Race in the Courtroom: Perceptions of Guilt and Dispositional Attributions

Sommers, Samuel R.; Ellsworth, Phoebe C.

doi:10.1177/0146167200263005

Cited by 212 publications

(295 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Studies that have separately manipulated actor and recipient group membership and found an effect of actor group on adult's third-party punishment have consistently found harsher punishment of out-group actors (7,9,10). Similarly, out-group members receive more second-party punishment for selfish behavior (12,13), and in the context of legal punishment, laboratory and field studies suggest that racial out-group members are judged more harshly (67,68). Thus, there appear to be many contexts in which selfish behavior does not trigger black-sheep or group norm maintenance effects.…”

Section: Recipient Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of in-group favoritism in children’s third-party punishment of selfishness

Jordan

McAuliffe

Warneken³

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

206

214

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When enforcing norms for cooperative behavior, human adults sometimes exhibit in-group bias. For example, third-party observers punish selfish behaviors committed by out-group members more harshly than similar behaviors committed by in-group members. Although evidence suggests that children begin to systematically punish selfish behavior around the age of 6 y, the development of in-group bias in their punishment remains unknown. Do children start off enforcing fairness norms impartially, or is norm enforcement biased from its emergence? How does bias change over development? Here, we created novel social groups in the laboratory and gave 6-and 8-year-olds the opportunity to engage in costly third-party punishment of selfish sharing behavior. We found that by age 6, punishment was already biased: Selfish resource allocations received more punishment when they were proposed by out-group members and when they disadvantaged in-group members. We also found that although costly punishment increased between ages 6 and 8, bias in punishment partially decreased. Although 8-y-olds also punished selfish outgroup members more harshly, they were equally likely to punish on behalf of disadvantaged in-group and out-group members, perhaps reflecting efforts to enforce norms impartially. Taken together, our results suggest that norm enforcement is biased from its emergence, but that this bias can be partially overcome through developmental change.cooperation | ontogeny | equality

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Section: Recipient Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of in-group favoritism in children’s third-party punishment of selfishness

Jordan

McAuliffe

Warneken³

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

206

214

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“…3 "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Amendment XIV, US Constitution 4 Given this difficulty, a number of studies (Devine, et al, 2000;Sommers and Ellsworth, 2000;MacCoun, 1989) have made use of experimental simulations of court cases, most often to understand the behavior of juries. While laboratory studies allow the careful manipulation of the variable of interest, defendant race, sectional studies suffer from a potentially severe omitted variables bias.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Judges Vary in Their Treatment of Race?

2007

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Are minorities treated differently by the legal system? Systematic racial differences in case characteristics, many unobservable, make this a difficult question to answer directly. In this paper, we estimate whether judges differ from each other in how they sentence minorities, avoiding potential bias from unobservable case characteristics by exploiting the random assignment of cases to judges. We measure the between-judge variation in the difference in incarceration rates and sentence lengths between AfricanAmerican and White defendants. We perform a Monte Carlo simulation in order to explicitly construct the appropriate counterfactual, where race does not influence judicial sentencing. In our data set, which includes felony cases from Cook County, Illinois, we find statistically significant between-judge variation in incarceration rates, although not in sentence lengths.

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“…However, when race was not made salient, White jurors rated the male defendant as more guilty, violent, and aggressive when he was described as Black than when he was described as White. Thus, making race salient can lead to alterations in behavior that are aligned with social norms about race (Sommers & Ellsworth, 2000. It is worth noting that most of the studies in this meta-analysis that manipulated race salience featured racial majority participants.…”

Section: Contextual Factorsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Dyadic interracial interactions: A meta-analysis

Babbitt¹,

Toosi²,

Ambady³

et al. 2011

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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This meta-analysis examined over 40 years of research on interracial interactions by exploring 4 types of outcomes: explicit attitudes toward interaction partners, participants' self-reports of their own emotional state, nonverbal or observed behavior, and objective measures of performance. Data were collected from 108 samples (N ϭ 12,463) comparing dyadic interracial and same-race interactions, predominantly featuring Black and White Americans. Effect sizes were small: Participants in same-race dyads tended to express marginally more positive attitudes about their partners (r ϭ .07), reported feeling less negative affect (r ϭ .10), showed more friendly nonverbal behavior (r ϭ .09), and scored higher on performance measures (r ϭ .07) than those in interracial dyads. Effect sizes also showed substantial heterogeneity, and further analyses indicated that intersectional, contextual, and relational factors moderated these outcomes. For example, when members of a dyad were the same sex, differences between interracial and same-race dyads in negative affect were reduced. Structured interactions led to more egalitarian performance outcomes than did free-form interactions, but the effects of interaction structure on nonverbal behavior depended on participant gender. Furthermore, benefits of intergroup contact were apparent: Differences in emotional state across dyadic racial composition disappeared in longer term interactions, and racial minorities, who often have greater experience with intergroup contact, experienced less negative affect in interracial interactions than did majority group members. Finally, there was a significant historical trend toward more egalitarian outcomes across dyadic racial composition for explicit attitudes and for nonverbal behavior; however, participants' emotional responses and performance have remained consistent.

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Race in the Courtroom: Perceptions of Guilt and Dispositional Attributions

Cited by 212 publications

References 27 publications

Development of in-group favoritism in children’s third-party punishment of selfishness

Development of in-group favoritism in children’s third-party punishment of selfishness

Do Judges Vary in Their Treatment of Race?

Dyadic interracial interactions: A meta-analysis

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