Graduation Year

2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

M.A.

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.)

Degree Granting Department

Psychology

Major Professor

Mark Pezzo, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Jason Beckstead, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Wendy Rote, Ph.D.

Keywords

ATF, fear, anger, judgment, error tradeoffs, crime

Abstract

In the public debate concerning crime, there are generally two opposing positions regarding error rates within guilt convictions: a greater concern for false positives (convicting an innocent person) or a greater concern for false negatives (not convicting a guilty person). Public attitudes have typically indicated that false positives should be considered worse, with a range in global surveys from 51% (Zhuo, 2021) to as high as 85% (Scurich, 2015) of the population expressing this perspective. To explore the reason behind these beliefs, the current study explores the effect of emotions. Lerner and Keltner (2000) found that fear and anger, though both considered negatively valanced emotions, yield distinct perceptions of risk. Fear causes people to have a higher perception of risk, while anger causes people to have a lower perception of risk (Lerner & Keltner, 2000, 2001). The literature expanded on this framework to include different inductions of emotions. Incidental inductions utilize emotions that are unrelated to the target risk, while integral inductions utilize emotions that are related to the target risk. Ferrer and Ellis (2021) found that there is an interaction of emotion and induction on risk perceptions, such that when the induction was integral, both fear and anger increased risk perception. When the induction was incidental, however, anger decreased risk perception, but fear was not significant. By inducing fear and anger in both integral and incidental conditions and including a no-emotion control condition, I will examine the effect on risk assessments, preferences on the error of greater concern, and the Blackstone ratio. Results are inconsistent with most ATF literature, but show similar findings to Ferrer and Ellis (2021) in that integral anger was the only experimental condition to demonstrate significantly different risk perceptions than the no-emotion control condition. Results on the Blackstone ratio were consistent with previous literature more so in the aspect of the error of greater concern, while findings about the ratio itself are relatively novel to research.

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