Psychological mechanisms underlying support for juvenile sex offender registry laws: prototypes, moral outrage, and perceived threat.

The Roles of Dehumanization and Moral Outrage in Retributive Justice

When innocents are intentionally harmed, people are motivated to see that offenders get their "just deserts". The severity of the punishment they seek is driven by the perceived magnitude of the harm and moral outrage. The present research extended this model of retributive justice by incorporating the role of offender dehumanization. In three experiments relying on survey methodology in Austra...

Political tolerance and coming to psychological closure following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: an integrative approach.

This study tested hypotheses generated from an integrative model of political tolerance that derived hypotheses from a number of different social psychological theories (e.g., appraisal tendency theory, intergroup emotion theory, and value protection models) to explain political tolerance following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A national field study (N = 550) found that immediate ...

Moral outrage mediates the dampening effect of system justification on support for redistributive social policies.

To understand how and why people tolerate ongoing social and economic inequality, we conducted two studies investigating the hypothesis that system justification is associated with reduced emotional distress and a lack of support for helping the disadvantaged. In Study 1, we found that the endorsement of a system-justifying ideology was negatively associated with moral outrage, existential guil...

Sealing the record: an analysis of jurisdictional variations of juvenile sex offender record sealing laws.

Assessment of moral judgment and empathy in young sex offenders: a comparison of clinical judgment and test results.

Professional decision making in forensic clinical practice may have lifelong consequences for offenders. Although information on moral development is important for prediction of reoffending and referral to adequate treatment, conclusions regarding moral development are still largely based on unstructured clinical judgment instead of assessment instruments. For this study, the authors examined t...