We Are Less Likely To Dehumanise Prisoners Who Are Approaching The End Of Their Sentence

By Emma Young Criminals are often characterised in the popular press as “animals” or “cold-blooded”. Such adjectives effectively dehumanise them, and there’s no end of research finding that if we deny fully human emotional and thinking capacities to other people, we are less likely to treat them in a humane way. But how long does prisoner dehumanisation last? Is it a life sentence? Or, wondered the authors of a new paper, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, does it depend on how long a prisoner has left to serve? Jason C. Deska at Ryerson University in Canada and his colleagues ran a series of seven studies to investigate this. In each, participants viewed a series of 20 mugshots of White men imprisoned in Florida. Though the mugshots were of real prisoners, the team manipulated the accompanying information, so that each man’s sentence was stated as being around 1,460 days (four years), and they had either served around one month or had only about one month left in prison. The first two studies, on 148 students and then 155 adults recruited online, revealed that the participants ascribed greater mental sophistication to the prisoners who were about to be released than to those who had only just started their sentences. These prisoners were credited with having greater emotional and cognitive faculties as well as greater agency — an ability to act according to their own individual intentions. They were, in other ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Forensic Morality Source Type: blogs