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Poster #109 - Essentialism is a Double-Edged Sword: The Production and Consequences of Essentialist Explanations for Incarceration

Fri, March 22, 7:45 to 9:15am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Philosophers have long debated how punishment should be justified. Whereas some argue that individuals should be punished for their unsavory internal features (e.g., bad dispositions) rather than their actions (Hume, 1739/1888), others posit that a person’s actions should primarily guide punishment decisions (Bentham, 1843/1962). Although a great deal of scholarship has described both of the above accounts, it is unclear how folk conceptions about why people are punished align with philosophical accounts of why people should be punished. To answer this question, we tested two hypotheses grounded in prior work on psychological essentialism—the notion that individuals’ characteristics arise from internal, immutable “essences” (Gelman, 2004). Considering children are especially prone to holding essentialist perspectives (Heiphetz, Gelman, & Young, 2017), we reasoned that children may believe individuals receive punishment for their bad internal qualities. Conversely, adults may be more likely to explain punishment by highlighting individuals’ bad actions. The current work tested these possibilities and investigated the consequences of these different explanations.

In Study 1, we asked 99 6-to 8-year-olds and 168 adults to define the words “jail” or “prison.” The purpose of this question was to determine how participants might spontaneously justify incarceration. In line with prior work suggesting children report more essentialism than adults, children were more likely than adults to mention incarcerated individuals’ internal badness by defining jails/prisons where “bad people” go, Χ2(1, N=267)=57.80, p<.001, whereas adults were more likely than children to mention bad behaviors, Χ2(1, N=267)=10.52, p=.001 (Fig. 1).

Study 2 investigated how justifications for incarceration influence children’s attitudes toward incarcerated people. This experiment built on a prior study testing one type of essentialist explanation among both children and adults. Here, we tested multiple essentialist explanations to determine whether differences might emerge among different explanations within one category. We also included only children, reasoning that their attitudes may be more malleable than adults’ because they have had less time to consolidate ideas about incarceration. We told 70 6-to 8-year-olds about people who were incarcerated for essentialist reasons (e.g., being a bad person, having something in his brain that makes him different from non-incarcerated people) and non-essentialist reasons (e.g., doing something wrong, not having much money); all participants then answered questions about their attitudes (e.g., how much they liked each character). Differences emerged both between and within these explanation categories. Overall, participants reported more positive attitudes toward individuals whose incarceration was attributed to non-essentialist, versus essentialist, causes (t(69)=6.09, p<.001). Further, participants exhibited more positive attitudes toward individuals whose incarceration was attributed to structural inequalities (e.g., poverty) rather than individual factors (e.g., doing something wrong), t(69)=12.09, p<.001, and more positive attitudes toward individuals whose incarceration was attributed to biological essences rather than simply bad essences (t(69)=11.39, p<.001; Fig. 2).

The present work suggests that perceptions of why individuals are punished may change throughout development and that different justifications for punishment impact attitudes toward incarcerated people. Taken together, these results may guide how justice advocates, media outlets, and children’s caretakers explain incarceration.

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