Assessing the Effect of Environmental Safety on Criminality Judgments

• In Event: Poster Session 1

Abstract

From a young age, we are instilled with a fundamental understanding of what constitutes safety versus danger—whether it's avoiding entering a stranger's car or refraining from walking alone at night. Consistent with this lifetime of training, research has shown that certain qualities within an environment can increase or decrease people’s likelihood of determining it as safe. In the perception literature, it is well known that many aspects of an environment can be processed with only a brief exposure. Studies have shown that these brief exposures can influence subsequent judgments and perceptions. This is a phenomenon known as priming. Priming's profound influence on subsequent judgments is extensively documented, with one notable facet being its effect on face judgments. Despite this, its effect on evaluations of criminality and recidivism judgments remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we conducted an experiment to investigate whether using safe and unsafe environmental scenes as a prime can impact how individuals rate people’s likelihood of committing a crime.

Authors

• Christiana Smith, University of Colorado Denver

• Carly Leonard, University of Colorado Denver