Public Opinion and Criminal Justice

Context, Practice and Values

Jane Wood, Theresa A. Gannon

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843924005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134021703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Public opinion is vital to the functioning of the criminal justice system but it is not at all clear how best to establish what this is, and what views people have on different aspects of criminal justice and the criminal justice system. Politicians and the media often assume that the public wants harsher, tougher and longer sentences, and policies may be shaped accordingly. Detailed research and more specific polling often tells a different story.

This book is concerned to shed further light on the nature of public views on criminal justice, paying particular attention to public opinion towards specific types of offenders, such as sex offenders and mentally disordered offenders. In doing so it challenges many enduring assumptions regarding people's views on justice, and confronts the myths that infect our understanding of what people think about the criminal justice system.

Part 1

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Public Opinion: Its Formation and Function

Chapter 1

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The psychology of attitudes and persuasion

Gerd Bohner and Michaela Wänke

Introduction

Evaluating people and things is one of the most basic mental processes (Tesser and Martin 1996). Attitudes, or summary evaluations of an object, are formed quickly, are communicated daily and influence people's thoughts, feelings and actions. For these reasons, attitudes have long been a key concept in social and applied psychology (Allport 1935; Bohner and Wänke 2002; Eagly and Chaiken 1998, Wood and Viki 2004). As important as the study of attitudes is the study of persuasion, the processes by which attitudes change. Because attitudes influence thought and action, knowing how to change attitudes is of vital importance for changing unwanted behaviour and strengthening desirable behaviour. Crime might be reduced if we could change attitudes that encourage criminal acts (e.g. hate crimes, pollution); court proceedings might become fairer if we could tackle attitudes that lead to unfair treatment of certain defendants; and secondary victimisation might be avoided if we could root out attitudes that contribute to blaming victims of violence (Bohner 1998).

In this chapter, we first discuss conceptual issues in attitude research. We then present a selective review of work on the formation and change of attitudes, with particular emphasis on recent integrative models of persuasion (for attitude measurement, see Viki and Bohner, this volume).

Conceptual issues in attitude research

Definition of attitude

We define attitude as a summary evaluation of an object of thought (Bohner and Wänke 2002). Central to this definition are the mental process of evaluation and the presence of an attitude object. An attitude object may be anything a person perceives or holds in mind. Attitude objects may be concrete (e.g. anchovy pizza) or abstract (e.g. justice), may be inanimate things (e.g. firearms), persons (e.g. Gordon Brown), groups (e.g. lawyers, homosexuals), or behaviours (e.g. littering, tax evasion, shoplifting).

Regarding the nature of the summary evaluation, researchers disagree as to whether an evaluation has to be enduring to qualify as an attitude. Some define attitudes as dispositions which are stored in long-term memory and retrieved when needed (e.g. Allport 1935; Eagly and Chaiken 1993, 2007; Petty et al. 1994). This approach has been called the ‘file-drawer model’ (Wilson and Hodges 1992) because it portrays attitudes as mental files which individuals consult when evaluating an object (for recent theories adopting this view, see Cohen and Reed 2006; Petty 2006). Contextual variation in the evaluation of a given object would thus be due either to people's unwillingness to report their ‘true’ attitude, or to their inability to retrieve an existing attitude from memory.

A competing view proposes that attitudes are temporary constructions which are formed when needed, based on information that is accessible in the given situation (e.g. Schwarz 2007; Tourangeau and Rasinski 1988; for reviews, see Schwarz and Bohner 2001; Wilson and Hodges 1992). Contextual variation in evaluative judgments would thus point to a change of the attitude itself. This approach has been called the ‘attitudes-as-constructions model’.

We prefer the attitudes-as-constructions model for reasons of parsimony and comprehensiveness. The model is more parsimonious because it does not claim as necessary an enduring disposition – although it does allow for the possibility that a previous evaluation is remembered and used, forming part of the attitude construction process. It is more comprehensive because it can explain contextual flexibility of attitudes as well as stability over time and contexts without treating evaluations that are recalled from memory any differently from other pieces of information used in attitude construction. If evaluative judgments remain stable, this is because the evaluative aspects of the material retrieved in order to construct an attitude themselves remain stable (for discussion, see Schwarz 2007; Schwarz and Bohner 2001).

Components and processes involved in attitude formation and expression

Both the experiences that lead to a certain attitude and the attitude's expressions are often divided into three components: beliefs about the attitude object make up the cognitive component; emotions and feelings elicited by the attitude object form the affective component; and (intended) actions directed at the attitude object form the behavioural component (Breckler 1984; Rosenberg and Hovland 1960). A person's negative attitude toward the police, for example, may thus entail: (1) the expectation that police officers are corrupt (negative belief); (2) fear of police violence (negative emotion); and (3) the intention to avoid police patrols in the street (negative behaviour).

The process of constructing an attitude judgment can be either effortful and controlled or spontaneous and automatic. When asked about their evaluation of a particular entity, people may consciously and deliberately construct an explicit attitude from relevant information that is accessible from memory or given in the situation (Schwarz and Bohner 2001; Wilson and Hodges 1992). It has also been shown, however, that the mere presence of an attitude object may elicit an automatic evaluative response, without any conscious thought or recollection taking place (Bargh 1997; Bargh et al. 1992). Importantly, such automatic attitudes may influence seemingly unrelated judgments or behaviours, and such influence may happen outside of a person's awareness. For example, people evaluate letters of the alphabet that are part of their own name more positively than other letters, without being aware of the name-letter connection (Nuttin 1985; for a review, see Koole and Pelham 2003). Deliberately retrieved or construed attitudes are often referred to as explicit attitudes whereas automatically activated attitudes – of which one may or may not be consciously aware – are often referred to as implicit attitudes. Implicit and explicit attitudes may sometimes differ in valence, for example a jury member may spontaneously feel negative towards the defendant but may deliberately take extenuating circumstances into account and thereby arrive at a more positive attitude.

At the level of measurement, we distinguish between directly asking respondents about their evaluation of an attitude object and indirect indicators of attitudes (e.g. the time respondents take in categorising or recognising objects). Analogous to the terminology introduced above, direct measures are also referred to as explicit measures and indirect measures as implicit measures (but see De Houwer 2006, for a more refined distinction). Indirect measures are useful for assessing aspects of attitudes that respondents may be either unwilling or unable to express when asked explicitly for an evaluation (see Fazio and Olson 2003; Viki and Bohner, this volume).

Attitude functions

Various taxonomies of attitude function have been proposed to describe the needs that attitudes may serve (e.g. Katz 1960; Shavitt 1989; Smith et al. 1956). Drawing on this research, we propose two main types of attitude function: (1) knowledge functions and (2) symbolic functions (see Bohner and Wänke 2002: Chapter 1).

To some extent, all attitudes serve a knowledge function. They help us in ‘sizing up’ objects and events in our environment, and an easily accessible attitude saves us the effort of figuring out anew how to behave each time we encounter an object (Smith et al. 1956: 41). Attitudes can thus regulate approach and avoidance, helping people to attain positive outcomes and to avoid negative outcomes. For example, a person's attitude toward the rehabilitation of offenders may be based on the attitude object's benefits (e.g. overall reduction of crime, implementing humanity and fairness) and costs (e.g. risk of reoffending, alienating victims of crime). It may guide behaviour that maximises the benefits and minimises the costs (e.g. supporting rehabilitation policies, but only for non-violent crimes).

Symbolic functions of attitudes comprise the aspects of valueexpression, social identification and self-esteem maintenance. Some attitudes are central to a person's self-concept; Prentice and Carlsmith (2000) have likened such attitudes to valued possessions. By expressing them, the person can affirm his or her core values. Also, attitudes can establish a person's identification with particular reference groups. For example, we may define ourselves as members of the social group of environmentalists by holding and expressing ‘ environmentalist’ attitudes. Finally, attitudes can serve the goal of self-esteem maintenance (Shavitt 1989) in at least two ways. Firstly, negative attitudes toward outgroups help to distance the individual from the threat that these groups are perceived to pose (Katz 1960; Smith et al. 1956). Secondly, positive attitudes toward liked objects and groups enable the individual to ‘bask in reflected glory’ (e.g. by wearing the colours of one's favourite sports team; Cialdini et al.1976).

Evaluations of the same object may entail different functions for different people; attitude functions have thus been described as aspects of personality (Smith et al. 1956). According to the matching hypothesis, attempts at changing an attitude should be most effective if they tackle the attitude's functional basis (e.g. Katz et al. 1956; Petty and Wegener 1998b; for a review, see Maio and Olson 2000). Note, however, that an attitude may serve various functions simultaneously, and the impact of a particular function may depend on which aspect of the attitude object is temporarily most salient (Shavitt 1989).

Cognitive representations of attitudes and of related knowledge

Cognitive representations of attitudinal knowledge may be studied in relation to (1) a single attitude's representation in memory (intraattitudinal structure) and (2) the mental relations between attitudes toward different objects (inter-attitudinal structure; Bohner and Wänke 2002: chapter 3; Eagly and Chaiken 1993, 1998).

Intra-attitudinal structure

Considerations of intra-attitudinal structure need to address how the attitude object, its associated summary evaluation and the link between the two are mentally represented (Fazio 2007). Going beyond these minimal requirements, researchers of attitude structure have addressed the memory contents that serve as inputs to the construction of attitudes, such as feelings and beliefs about the attitude object. They have also studied to what extent individual components of such an extended attitude representation (e.g. beliefs and evaluations) are consistent with each other.

An attitude may be represented along a bipolar continuum, functioning like a cognitive schema in information processing. Thus information ‘fitting’ the attitude schema is often processed more efficiently than information not fitting the schema. In a study by Judd and Kulik (1980), students read belief statements concerning several issues (e.g. ‘The Equal Rights Amendment should be supported by all who believe that discrimination is wrong’) and indicated how much they agreed with each statement; response times were measured, and free recall for the statements was assessed later. Results showed that more extremely evaluated statements were processed faster and recalled better than less extreme statements. Thus information may fit an attitude schema to the extent that it is located near the poles of a bipolar continuum.

But not all attitudes are likely to be represented as bipolar. Pratkanis (1989) showed that bipolar representations are most common for controversial social issues, whereas unipolar structures are usually found for less disputed topics like music and sports. For these unipolar issues, people mainly possess knowledge congruent with their own position and find it difficult to encode information opposing their attitudes.

Another question of intra-attitudinal structure is how attitudes are integrated from more elementary cognitions about the attitude object. Some researchers (e.g. Fishbein 1967), have described an attitude as the sum of ‘expectancy × value’ products:

In this equation, A₀ is the attitude toward object O, b_i denotes the belief or expectancy that the object possesses a certain attribute I, and e_i stands for the evaluation of that attribute. The equation comprises only salient attributes – those that a person considers relevant and attends to. The model can be illustrated by calculating a person's attitude toward jury service on the basis of his or her individual beliefs and evaluations (see Table 1.1). Composite attitude scores that result from summing belief-evaluation products usually correlate highly with direct self-report measures of attitude (e.g. Fishbein and Coombs 1974).

An important structural issue is intra-attitudinal consistency. People may evaluate an attitude object both favourably and unfavourably at the same time. Our example in Table 1.1 shows how a moderately positive attitude can result from integrating beliefs with clearly positive and negative evaluation components. This coexistence of favourable and unfavourable beliefs is called attitudinal ambivalence (e.g. Kaplan 1972). A typical example is attitudes toward drinking alcohol. People may evaluate favourably the taste of a pint of beer and the social aspects of going out for a drink, but at the same time they may be repelled by the prospect of a hangover or of being fined for drunk driving. Generally, research has shown that more internally consistent attitudes are more stable over time and more predictive of behaviour (Rosenberg 1960; Chaiken et al. 1995).

Some structural aspects of a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Dedication
• Part 1: Public Opinion: Its Formation and Function
• Part 2: Public Opinion: Victims and Offenders
• Index