Beautiful but dangerous: Effects of offender attractiveness and nature of the crime on juridic judgment.

Abstract

Varied the physical attractiveness of a criminal defendant (attractive, unattractive, or no information) and the nature of the crime (attractiveness-related or attractiveness-unrelated) in a factorial design. After reading 1 of the case accounts, 120 undergraduates sentenced the defendant to a term of imprisonment. An interaction was predicted: When the crime was unrelated to attractiveness (burglary), Ss would assign more lenient sentences to the attractive defendant than to the unattractive defendant; when the offense was attractiveness-related (swindle), the attractive defendant would receive harsher treatment. Results confirm the predictions, thereby supporting a cognitive explanation for the relationship between the physical attractiveness of defendants and the nature of the judgments made against them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)