An Examination of the Implicit Criminal Mind: Priming Criminality Can Strengthen Self and Criminality Associations Outside of Conscious Awareness

• In Event: Implicit Social Cognitive Processes Underlying Criminal and Victim Identities: Data from Laboratory Experiments and Field Studies

Abstract

Contextual cues that remind individuals of their past experiences can have potent effects on social cognition and behavior. Implicit social cognition research in particular demonstrates the conditions under which environmental cues can prime and activate mental representations of beliefs and attitudes. Moreover, such cues can link mental representations that were previously unrelated. Finally, this process can occur implicitly – that is, automatically and outside of individuals’ awareness. The implications of this research for justice-involved individuals are presented in this paper. Specifically, given that justice-involved people are often reminded of their criminal past (e.g., via their relationships with other justice-involved people and/or with justice system officials), they might exhibit relatively strong implicit criminal identities. Furthermore, implicit criminal identities can be linked to related affect and cognition that can be detrimental to justice-involved individuals. These hypotheses were tested in a study in which the salience of past criminal experiences was experimentally manipulated, then participants completed reaction time measures that tap into the implicit social cognition of criminality. The results of this experiment have important implications for the persistence of an implicit criminal identity and its detrimental effects on persistence/desistance from criminal behavior.

Authors

• Luis M. Rivera, Rutgers University

• Bonita Veysey, Rutgers University