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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Soc. Psychol.
Sec. Attitudes, Social Justice and Political Psychology
Volume 2 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frsps.2024.1456591
This article is part of the Research Topic Applying cognitive and social psychology to the legal system: What we know today and what is next View all 8 articles

Intersection of Race and Socio-economic Status on Criminal Judgments: High Status Reduces Blame for Black Juveniles but Increases Blame for White Juveniles

Provisionally accepted
Elizabeth A. Gilbert Elizabeth A. Gilbert 1*Alex P Guinn Alex P Guinn 2N Dickon Reppucci N Dickon Reppucci 1
  • 1 University of Virginia, Charlottesville, United States
  • 2 The Fifth Avenue Committee, New York, NY, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Both Black juveniles and low-socioeconomic status (SES) juveniles are disproportionately represented in the U.S. legal system. Yet minimal experimental work has teased apart how a juvenile’s race and SES interact when affecting judgments about guilt, blame, and punishment. Two vignette experiments (N = 1074) varied a juvenile defendant’s race (Black or White) and SES (low or high) in two types of crimes (stereotypically Black or stereotypically White). Results showed that race and SES interacted: across crime type, high-SES White juveniles were assigned more guilt and blame whereas high-SES Black juveniles were assigned less guilt and blame than their low-SES counterparts. Low-SES Black juveniles were also judged relatively harshly when their guilt was certain or when excluding participants who guessed the study was about race or SES. Moreover, stereotype-related judgments such as likelihood of recidivism and character mediated these effects. These surprising results highlight the need to investigate the intersection between race and SES. Potential explanations including aversive racism, social ecology, and changing stereotypes are considered.

    Keywords: race, socio-economic status, jury decision-making, legal judgments, stereotypes, Juvenile justice

    Received: 16 Jul 2024; Accepted: 15 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Gilbert, Guinn and Dickon Reppucci. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Elizabeth A. Gilbert, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, United States

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