Aden Bhagwat – Psychology & Criminology

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Shaping Biases Towards the Prosecution or the Defense: The Role of Disgust Sensitivity and Valence Weighting Bias

Introduction:
Attitudes can form in many ways, such as through disgust sensitivity- the degree to which individuals experience the emotion of disgust- or valence weighting bias (VWB)- a process in which negative and positive attitudes are generalized to a novel stimulus. These processes are correlated with political conservatism and dangerous world beliefs. What is unknown is how these processes are associated with juror’s punitiveness towards criminals. Hoping to expand upon this, we used the Pretrial Juror Attitudes Questionnaire (PJAQ) along with measures of disgust sensitivity and VWB.

Methods:
Study 1: Subjects were 109 participants recruited online. VWB was measured through Beanfest, a game in which participants interact with a novel stimulus and demonstrate their approach or avoidance tendencies. Subjects also completed the Three Domains of Disgust Scale (TDDS) and the PJAQ. We hypothesized that high disgust sensitivity and low VWB, would correlate with higher punitiveness on the PJAQ scale.

Study 2: Subjects were 240 undergraduate students. Half of the subjects were randomly assigned to be ‘recalibrated’ during Beanfest- given objectively correct feedback after their in-game decisions, which attenuates VWB. We hypothesized that recalibrated participants’ attitudes would be less extreme.

Results:
Study 1: Disgust sensitivity was positively correlated with the PJAQ, and with 5 of the 6 PJAQ subscales, although there was no correlation with VWB. There was an interaction between VWB and sexual disgust sensitivity predicting overall PJAQ scores (B= -.487, t(108)= 2.159, p= .033).

Study 2: While most correlations from Study 1 held true and remained significant, there was a negative correlation between the Social Justice PJAQ subscale and sexual disgust sensitivity. Unfortunately, an Independent Samples T-Test did not show any differences between the recalibration and control conditions in relation to the PJAQ (t(238)= .097, p= .923).

Conclusions:
These studies support the literature, showing evidence of a strong relationship between disgust sensitivity and attitudes towards criminals. Interestingly, there were differences between domains of disgust and their relations to the PJAQ, with sexual disgust strongly correlating with most aspects. The interaction between valence weighting bias and sexual disgust was also novel and should be explored further.