The Social Psychological Role of Subjective Harm in Punishment
Authors: Janice Nadler, Mary R. Rose
This research investigates the factors that play a psychological role in laypersons’ decisions about justice and responsibility. In criminal cases jurors sometimes hear, by way of victim impact statements, about highly idiosyncratic, but nevertheless potentially powerful, information regarding the aftermath of the crime. In tort cases, jurors hear extensively about damages incurred by the plaintiff. The extent to which people attend to and make use of outcome information in making judgments about liability and responsibility is a key empirical question that has not been adequately investigated. The study’s findings have shown that in the context of a criminal trial, mock jurors are more punitive when emotional harm to the victim is more severe. Specifically, mock jurors imposed more punishment on a robbery defendant when the victim had a difficult time coping emotionally with the crime, compared to when the victim’s emotional reaction was mild. More recently, research on the extent to which emotion norms underlie perceptions of victims finds support for a proportionality rule - that people expect the severity of a victim’s emotional response to match the seriousness of the crime.