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Judged Likelihood of Different Second Crimes: A Function of Judged Similarity
Journal of Applied Social Psychology
Abstract
Numerous studies have concluded that the judged probability of conviction for a crime is higher when information concerning a prior conviction is disclosed. This is even more true when the prior and present crimes are the same. This paper examines the argument that the influence of a hypothetical previous conviction on the judgment of predilection toward a hypothetical present crime is a continuous function of the degree of similarity between past and present crimes. The subjects were presented with all possible pairs of 10 crimes, the first being considered as a prior conviction and the second as a presently charged crime. The subjects judged the subjective likelihood that a person convicted of the first crime (C1) would, in fact, he of a mind and inclination to commit the second one (C2). Independent judgments of intercrime, undefined similarity also were obtained. The main experimental findings, as expected, were that the judged probability of C2. given C1, was: (a) greatest when C2 was a repeat of C1; (b) uniquely different for each C1; (c) predicted quite well by degree of intercrime similarity; (d) poorly predicted by crime seriousness values. Thus, the subject appears to make judgments of predilection on the basis of simple representativeness heuristics, which specify that certain crimes will be considered more likely if they are more semantically related to earlier ones. Such a mental device unfortunately would he systematically biased in courtroom settings because judgments of intercrime similarity are not influenced by real-world probabilities.
... After deliberation, a recent dissimilar PCE even led to significantly lower guilt ratings compared to the "no information about the defendant's criminal history" and "no PCE" conditions. Thus, whereas recent similar PCE can increase guilt ratings of the current charge, recent dissimilar PCE can work in the defendant's advantage, because jurors might hold the beliefs that offenders commit similar offenses in the future, but are less likely to commit other offenses (Howe 1991). One exception is a prior conviction for indecent assault on a child, because this type of PCE trumped any effect of similarity (Lloyd-Bostock 2000) and created the greatest prejudice against the defendant (e.g., Cowley and Colyer 2010). ...
... However, PCE for a home break-in was sufficient in a bank robbery case to increase guilty verdicts (Greene and Dodge 1995). Future research should measure how participants rate the similarity of the two offenses and what participants deduce from similar PCE for their judgments of guilt (e.g., does similarity offer information about habitual cues, motives, criminal propensity; see Howe 1991). ...
Experimental studies on the effect of prior conviction evidence (PCE) on judgments of guilt are conflicting, ranging from an increase of guilt to a decrease of guilt, depending on certain boundary conditions. The overall effect of PCE seems to be small and likely depends on moderators. Due to small samples or because of lack of experimental manipulations, these moderators could not yet be meta-analyzed. This literature review follows up on these moderators with the aim to provide a clearer understanding under which circumstances PCE could harm or benefit the defendant, or when prior convictions
of the defendant are completely irrelevant. Existing literature on PCE was reviewed to identify potential moderators and to provide directions for future research. Identified moderators were categorized into PCE characteristics (similarity and seriousness of PCE, PCE quantity, admissibility, and limiting instructions), case characteristics (ambiguity, seriousness of current offense), and methodological moderators (salience, control condition and manipulation checks, sample, individual vs. group decisions, richness of stimulus materials). PCE effects seem to depend on various factors that greatly narrow the influence of PCE. Therefore, an integrative perspective is proposed for future studies that take legal decision-making theories and information processing theories into account.
This article reports two experiments requiring subjective evaluative judgments of the potential dangerousness of hypothetical persons. The research operationally fits the paradigm for the study of personality impression formation, and seeks to illuminate the processes by which two offenses combine to evoke a net judgment of dangerousness. The theoretical framework and philosophy adopted is Anderson's information integration and functional measurement theory. In Study 1, all paired combinations of 10 distinctive crimes were each presented as having been committed by the same person on two separate occasions. Subjects judged overall offender dangerousness. In Study 2, judgments of dangerousness were made when the time purportedly elapsing between two crimes was systematically varied over several ranges of up to 41 years. Three key findings emerged. First, judgments of dangerousness result from an averaging process. This result yields paradoxical implications having considerable pragmatic significance. Second, judgments of dangerousness following two sequential criminal acts (one of high and one of low seriousness) are consistently higher when the high seriousness one is the second crime. Third, with certain qualifications discussed in the text, a serious earlier crime appears to elicit an approximately constant magnitude of judged present dangerousness no matter how long ago it was perpetrated. This result implies that subjects infer considerable permanence of criminal predilection to those who have committed a serious crime in the past.
Blameworthiness, in the criminal law context, is conceived as the carefully calculated end product of discrete judgments about a transgressor’s intentionality, causal proximity to harm, and the harm’s foreseeability. Research in social psychology, on the other hand, suggests that blaming is often intuitive and automatic, driven by a natural impulsive desire to express and defend social values and expectations. The motivational processes that underlie psychological blame suggest that judgments of legal blame are influenced by factors the law does not always explicitly recognize or encourage. In this Article we focus on two highly related motivational processes – the desire to blame bad people and the desire to blame people whose motive for acting was bad. We report three original experiments that suggest that an actor’s bad motive and bad moral character can increase not only perceived blame and responsibility, but also perceived causal influence and intentionality. We show that people are motivated to think of an action as blameworthy, causal, and intentional when they are confronted with a person who they think has a bad character, even when the character information is totally unrelated to the action under scrutiny. We discuss implications for doctrines of mens rea definitions, felony murder, inchoate crimes, rules of evidence, and proximate cause.
Developed and tested a psychometric instrument sensitive to several facets of dangerous behavior (personality, situational, facilitating, global estimate, and rater confidence in judgment factors) among forensic patients. Two trained nonclinical raters used the scale in assessing the dangerousness of 210 patients interviewed in a pretrial forensic clinic. Reliability, item, and factor analysis refined the instrument into the 15-item Dangerous Behavior Rating Scheme. Profiles of patients during a 2-yr follow-up were constructed from contacts with the correctional system and 5 psychiatric hospitals and were rated on dangerousness to others by 9 independent judges. A Pearson product-moment correlation of +.34 was yielded between aggregated factor scores derived from the instrument and follow-up dangerous behavior. It is concluded that, given the limited ability of either clinicians or psychometric instruments to predict dangerous behavior and the socially constructed nature of the dangerousness phenomenon, predictions about future violence should be adopted into practice only under restricted conditions. A number of these limitations are summarized. (59 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved)
Investigated the perception of risks (e.g., diseases, accidents, natural hazards) using a multitask, multimodel approach. 18 risks were rated by 245 undergraduates to examine the proximities among the risks induced by 3 tasks: judgment of similarity, conditional prediction, and dimensional evaluation. The comparative judgments (similarity and prediction) were reasonably close, but the dimensional evaluation did not correlate highly with either similarity or prediction. Similarity judgments and conditional predictions were best represented by tree models which are based on discrete features, whereas the dimensional evaluations were better explained by spatial models such as multidimensional scaling and factor analysis. Implications for the study of mental representations and for the analysis of risk perception are discussed. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
According to law, a defendant may be tried for multiple offenses in a single trial, although the courts intuitively recognize that such "joinder" may be prejudicial. The present study investigated the effects of joinder on jurors' decisions, emphasizing the social psychological mechanisms underlying judgmental biases. 732 representative jurors (aged 18–82 yrs) judged a videotaped trial of a single offense or a joined trial of 3 offenses that varied as a function of (a) charge similarity, (b) evidence similarity, and (c) judges' instructions designed to reduce judgment biases. A defendant was more likely to be convicted on a particular charge in a joined trial than on the same charge tried alone, and judges' instructions were ineffective. Joinder produced confusion of evidence and negative inferences about the defendant, but did not significantly influence perceptions of evidence strength. Defendant and evidence ratings were strongly related to verdicts, whereas confusion was not. Results suggest that the effects of joinder are mediated through inferences about the defendent's criminality. (64 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Argues that one solution to the problem of establishing replicable generalizations in psychological research lies in aggregating behavior over situations and/or occasions, thereby canceling out incidental, uncontrollable factors relative to experimental factors. Such a procedure increases reliability without introducing excessive constraints into the experimental situation. The value of such aggregation was demonstrated in 4 studies in Part I of this paper (Epstein, 1979) that examined a variety of data, including the subjective and objective measurement of behavior in the field and in the laboratory. Four kinds of aggregation are discussed, each of which reduces a specific source of error. The degree of aggregation that is required varies inversely with the degree to which the events studied are ego-involving, implicitly or explicitly include an adequate sample of behavioral observation, or have been demonstrated to be robust over incidental sources of variation. (58 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The rationale for allowing into evidence a defendant’s criminal record asserts that such evidence can be used for the limited purpose of impeaching a defendant witness’s credibility and, in accord with judges' instructions, will not be used to assess likelihood of guilt. The effect that the defendant’s prior record has on mock jurors' assessments of credibility and guilt was tested in a two (cases) x four (type of prior conviction) factorial design. Adult’s ratings of the defendant’s credibility did not vary as a function of prior record and were consistently the lowest of the credibility ratings of all witnesses. Conviction rates did vary by prior record, however, with the highest conviction rate occurring when the prior conviction was the same as the present charge and the lowest conviction rate occurring in the no-prior-conviction condition. Defendants with a previous conviction for perjury or a dissimilar crime were convicted at an intermediate rate. We concluded that the risk of prejudice to the defense under existing policy is greater than the unrealized potential benefit to the prosecution.
The present research investigated decision-making processes in joined trials of multiple offenses. Subjects judged videotaped trials of three joined charges in a factorial design that varied charge similarity, evidence similarity, and judges' instructions designed to reduce judgement biases; or judged one of several charges presented individually. The results indicated that subjects were more likely to convict a defendant in a joined trial than on the same charge tried by itself, particularly when the charge was presented in the third position. Convictions were more frequent when joined charges were similar, and judges' instructions significantly reduced conviction rates. Subjects judging joined trials confused evidence among charges, rated the prosecution's evidence as stronger, and rated the defendent less favorably than subjects judging single trials. The findings were compared statistically to the results of previous research, and it was concluded that increased convictions in joined trials are robust effects.
Criminal courts routinely allow a defendant to be tried for multiple charges in a single trial. The practice is known as joinder of offenses. The issue of joinder of offenses is examined from a legal and psychological perspective. Relevant court decisions and their implications are discussed. In addition, the recent research conducted by social scientists concerning the possible reasons for the prejudicial effects of joinder of offenses is critically reviewed. Suggestions are offered, based upon previous joinder research, for the direction of future research into the loci of the effect and into potential remedies.
In two experiments, subject-jurors read evidence from actual criminal cases, decided on the guilt of the defendant, and answered several additional questions. The defendant was accused of one charge (murder or rape) or two charges (both murder and rape). In both experiments, the defendant was more likely to be convicted of either crime if the two charges were joined in one trial. Trait ratings indicated that the defendant was perceived in a more negative way when standing trial on two offenses. The order in which the charges were heard had no effect, nor did instructions to subjects to judge the cases separately.
Dihydroxyacetone (DHA) kinase of Klebsiella pneumoniae, a gene product of the dha regulon responsible for fermentative dissimilation of glycerol and DHA, was purified 120-fold to a final specific activity of 10 mumol X min-1 X mg of protein-1 at 30 degrees C. The enzyme, a dimer of a 53,000 +/- 5,000-dalton polypeptide, is highly specific for DHA (Km, ca.4 microM). Glycerol is not a substrate at 1 mM and is not an inhibitor even at 100 mM. The enzyme is not inhibited by 5 mM fructose-1,6-diphosphate. Ca2+ gives a higher enzyme activity than Mg2+ as a cationic cofactor. Escherichia coli glycerol kinase acts on both glycerol and DHA and is allosterically inhibited by fructose-1,6-diphosphate. Antibodies raised against E. coli glycerol kinase cross-reacted with K. pneumoniae glycerol kinase but not with K. pneumoniae DHA kinase.
The effects of prior experience on case judgments were investigated by asking mock jurors to decide defendants' guilt in either a rape-vandalism or vandalism-rape case presentation order. Mock jurors with prior experience on the rape case were found to favor conviction in the vandalism case significantly more often than jurors without such experience. However, jurors with prior experience on the vandalism case were significantly less likely to convict the defendant in the rape case than those judging that case without experience. Various explanations along with the two major hypotheses motivating the study are discussed, and the implications of effects from repeated experience are considered in light of recent proposals to reduce the required term of jury service.
This article addresses the role of quantitative evidence and methods in trials. Major arguments against the introduction of explicit computation information are considered and contrasted with findings about the characteristics of the unaided human decision maker. Emphasis is given to behavioral decision theory and the heuristic biases it reveals. Consideration is given to the symbolic versus "truth-finding" functions of trials, mathematical models (especially linear) of decision making, advocacy tactics that follow from what has been learned about how humans process information, the diagnostic value of aggregate probabilities, the notion of particularistic proof, and the evaluation of witness credibility. We conclude that unaided human decision making embodies certain normal and lawful errors, and that the exclusion of mathematical guides to aid a fact finder, while avoiding some problems, exposes the fact-finding process to the heuristic biases of intuitive decision making.
Approximately 69% of a group of young parolees were rearrested for a serious crime within 6 years of their release from prison, 53% were convicted for a new offense, and 49% returned to pris-on. These findings are based on a sample of 3,995 parolees, representing 11,347 persons between the ages of 17 and 22, who were paroled from prisons in 22 States in 1978. These States accounted for 50% of all State prison-ers paroled in the Nation during that year. Other findings include the follow-ing: • Excluding violations of parole and probation, these parolees were re-arrested for more than 36,000 new fel-onies or serious misdemeanors, includ-ing approximately 6,700 violent crimes . and nearly 19,000 property crimes. • Approximately 10% of the persons paroled accounted for 40% of the sub--sequent arrest offenses. • About a fifth of the subsequent ar-rests occurred in States other than the original paroling State. • An estimated 37% of the parolees were rearrested while still on parole. • Recidivism rates were highest in the first 2 years after an offender's release from prison. Within 1 year, 32% of Recidivism is one of the most important issues facing those who formulate and administer our sentencing and corrections policies-policies intended to punish and rehabilitate offenders and to protect the public from crim e. This special report, with its innovative methodology, broad scope of coverage, and rich data, should be of particular interest to all those concerned abou t these policies. This report traces the criminal activities over a 6-year period of a sample of young adults paroled in 1978 from prisons in 22 those paroled had been rp.arrestedj within 2 years, 47% had been re-arrested.
In the past, there have been three major approaches to the experimental investigation of the jury. First, juror selection research involves the study of the relation between verdicts or leniency toward certain classes of defendants and the characteristics of potential jurors. The second class of research is group study, in which the amount and style of individual participation is observed within the context of simulated jury deliberations (e.g., Strodtbeck, James and Hawkins, 1957). Finally, experimental psychology has made another contribution to the study of the jury; numerous researchers have conducted experimental studies employing legal stimulus materials. Typically, in such a study, the presence or absence of a piece of evidence or other information about a hypothetical case is varied, and its effects on judgments about the defendant by individual jurors are assessed (e.g., Landy and Aronson, 1969).
There are two compelling reasons for studying groups in addition to studying individuals. First, the method by which an individual arrives at a judgment may not be analogous to the procedure by which a jury arrives at a verdict. A second disadvantage in relying solely on individual verdicts is the difficulty in examining the decision-making process, since it is essentially private. The public nature of a group deliberation allows greater accessibility to these processes. By examining group discussions of cases, one may gain insight into the manner in which certain factors affect jury decisions. Thus, it is worthwhile to carry out experimental studies using groups of simulated juries.
The relative contributions of cognitive processing of evidence and invocation of a criminal schema to the effects of joinder of offenses was investigated. One hundred forty simulated jurors either judged no evidence or judged evidence from one or two charges with the knowledge that the defendant had been charged with either one, two, three, or four offenses. The results showed that guilt evaluations, defendant character ratings, and measures of memory were influenced more by the number of charges judged than by the number of charges filed. Results from two path analyses suggest that the joinder effect is mediated by both cognitive factors and judgments about the defendant's character. Joinder appears to affect the cognitions generated about the cases, which in turn affect perceptions of the defendant and ultimately guilt assessment.
An experiment was conducted to determine the possible prejudicial effect of joining two similar criminal offenses in one trial, as compared to severing those offenses into separate trials. Levels of evidence (clear case for the prosecution, or a close case), trial mode (severed, combined with a clear or a close case), and position of case presentation in the joined trial (first or second) were combined in two 2 × 3 × 2 designs. The results indicated that clear cases received more guilty verdicts than close cases; joined trials obtained more guilty verdicts than severed trials; and first cases in joined trials received higher guilt scores than their severed counterparts or their joined counterparts presented second. The position effect seemed particularly strong when a close case was presented first and combined with a clear case in a joined trial.
The effects of inadmissible evidence on the judgments of mock jurors were examined in a 2 × 3 design. Subjects (N= 168) read a trial transcript in which critical testimony was introduced either by the prosecution or by the defense and subsequently ruled admissible, ruled inadmissible, or ruled inadmissible with an admonishment by the judge to disregard that testimony. A Control condition in which the critical testimony was omitted was also run. Results indicated that judgments of the defendant's guilt were strongly influenced by the critical testimony when it was ruled admissible. When it was simply ruled inadmissible, the critical testimony had little effect on the guilt judgments. However, when the judge specifically admonished the jurors to disregard the inadmissible testimony, their verdicts were influenced in the direction of that testimony. Further, subjects in the Inadmissible With Admonishment conditions indicated a significantly greater desire to be allowed to consider the inadmissible testimony than did subjects in the Inadmissible Without Admonishment conditions. The results were interpreted in terms of psychological reactance (Brehm, 1966).
Under federal and state laws, a defendant who has been charged with more than one offense can be tried for all the offenses in a single “joined” trial. It was predicted that the probabillty a defendant would be convicted would increase as a function of the number of joined offenses. Legal theories, research on memory, and social psychological models of information integration and attribution led to three hypotheses as to why this bias might occur: (1) confusion of evidence, (2) accumulation of evidence, and (3) inference of a criminal disposition. Subjects read and judged written trial summaries presented as joined or single trials. In Study 1, joinder resulted in higher rates of conviction and in confusion of evidence. In Study 2, the conviction results were replicated, and subjects judging joined trials also rated the evidence as more incriminating and made negative attributions about the defendant. These ratings were strongly related to judgments of guilt. A sequential judgment process was also found to affect jurors' judgments.
This research explored the correlates and dimensionality of judgments of crimes varying widely in seriousness, and the structure of their mental representation. In Experiment 1, 27 crimes were judged independently along 12 scales. A principal-factors analysis of interscale correlations yielded a major factor of evaluation, best defined by scales of seriousness, moral wrongfulness, and severity of deserved punishment. Judgments concerning perceptions of probability of conviction, punishment given, likelihood of physical harm, offender dangerousness, and degree of understanding also loaded on the evaluation factor. The second factor was Frequency of Occurrence. The results were generally stable at the local levels of person crimes and nonperson crimes. In Experiment 2 crime stimuli were subjected to pairwise similarity judgments that were analyzed using the Kruskal-Shepard MDSCAL and Sattath-Tversky ADDTREE procedures. MDSCAL yielded an interpretable two-dimensional representation and permitted approximate recovery of the seriousness ordering of crimes. The ADDTREE solution yielded two major partitionings, of person versus nonperson crimes, and several psychologically significant nested subsets clustered within each partition. The two psychometric outcomes were congruent. The overall results confirm a primary dimension of evaluation/seriousness. Implications for research in criminology and the comparative merits of similarity judgments versus single-scale seriousness ratings of crimes are discussed.
In a 2 × 3 design, simulated jurors received either weak or strong evidence against a defendant in a murder case. Within each evidence condition, subjects were given either additional evidence ruled admissible, additional evidence ruled inadmissible, or no additional evidence. Results indicated that (a) jurors were biased by inadmissible evidcnce in the weak-evidence but not in the strong-evidence condition, (b) strong evidence resulted in more guilty verdicts than did weak evidence, (c) confidence in verdict was influenced by strength of evidence, and (d) confidence of guilt was positively correlated with severity of punishment. Implications of the results are discussed within the context of the judicial process.
This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: (i) representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process B; (ii) availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development; and (iii) adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgements and decisions in situations of uncertainty.
This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: (i) representativeness,
which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process
B; (ii) availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a
class or the plausibility of a particular development; and (iii) adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical
prediction when a relevant value is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead
to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could
improve judgements and decisions in situations of uncertainty.
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