AUTHOR=Caldas Ivete Furtado Ribeiro , Paim Igor de Moraes , Leite Karla Tereza Figueiredo , de Mello Junior Harold Dias , Bataglia Patrícia Unger Raphael , Martins Raul Aragão , Pereira Antonio TITLE=Out of sight out of mind: Psychological distance and opinion about the age of penal majority JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=13 YEAR=2022 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.763335 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2022.763335 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=
The growth of urban violence in Brazil, as in other countries, has led citizens to demand more severe and punitive measures to solve the problem of juvenile crime. One motion submitted to the Brazilian parliament, for instance, proposes to reduce the age of penal majority (APM) from 18 to 16 years. Our hypothesis is that popular opinions about this proposal are largely constrained by construal levels and psychological distance. Accordingly, we expect that the knowledge and proximity to the circumstances associated with juvenile transgression will influence opinions about the proposal. To test this hypothesis, we evaluated how opinion against or for the proposal can be explained by psychological distance and moral development theory. We studied two samples, composed of people who do not have a deep experience with the subject (passersby in a public square (