The Effects of Child Abuse on Support for Sentencing Outcomes: The Moderating Role of Essentialist Thinking

• In Event: Psychological Mechanisms Underlying Lay Support for Criminal Sentencing Outcomes

Abstract

Research suggests that an offender’s history of child abuse may affect support for his sentencing, particularly as it relates to mitigation and the objectives of his punishment. Previous studies have looked at a defendant’s history of different child abuse types, such as trauma, neglect, physical abuse, or sexual abuse, in capital and non-capital sentencing contexts, but no research has yet examined how and why sentencing support may vary based on when the abuse occurs during an offender’s childhood. This experiment, using a sample of U.S. public collected via Qualtrics Panel, examines how the age at which a defendant’s child abuse occurs (prenatally, early childhood abuse, later childhood abuse, teen/adolescence) affects support for the length and objectives of his punishment. We hypothesized that participants’ trait essentialist thinking, a common psychological belief that individuals have certain fundamental attributes that dictate their identities, outcomes, and “make them” who they are, would moderate levels of sentencing support for offenders with histories of prenatal and earlier childhood, rather than later childhood or teenage, abuse. Results suggest the importance of psychological essentialism in predicting punishment attitudes for offenders with childhood abuse, as well as implications for considering child abuse as a mitigating factor in sentencing practices.

Authors

• Sandy Xie, Rutgers University

• Colleen Berryessa, Rutgers University

• Jason Silver, Rutgers University