Defendant Sentences as a Function of Attractiveness and Justification for Actions

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Abstract
In a test of the hypotheses that (a) defendants who have high external justification for their behavior would be sentenced less severely than defendants with low external justification and (b) an attractive defendant with low external justification would be sentenced more severely than an unattractive defendant, 60 American college students were randomly assigned without regard to sex to one of four treatments generated by two types of defendant descriptions (attractive vs. unattractive) and by two levels of defendant external justification (high vs. low: i.e., unspecified). Results confirmed both the predicted main effect for external justification (p < .05) and the defendant characteristics by external justification interaction (p < .05). Attractive defendants, therefore, were not inevitably treated more leniently than unattractive defendants.

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