We hypothesized that increasing the amount of individuating but case-irrelevant information about... more We hypothesized that increasing the amount of individuating but case-irrelevant information about a target in a date-rape trial ji.e.. cither the defendant or the victim/witness) would increase attributions of responsibility for that target and would thus influence judgments of defendant guilt. As predicted, merely adding trivial infomation, such as the victim's age, collcge major, and city of residence, to the rape trial vignette decreased judgments of guilt for the defendant; whereas adding corresponding information regarding the defendant increased judgments of his guilt. Ratings of perceived similarity to defendant and victim correlated significantly with responsibility and guilt, but were unaffected by the information manipulation. We suggest that target information increases target salience, which results in an increase of attributions of responsibility.
We hypothesized that increasing the amount of individuating but case-irrelevant information about... more We hypothesized that increasing the amount of individuating but case-irrelevant information about a target in a date-rape trial ji.e.. cither the defendant or the victim/witness) would increase attributions of responsibility for that target and would thus influence judgments of defendant guilt. As predicted, merely adding trivial infomation, such as the victim's age, collcge major, and city of residence, to the rape trial vignette decreased judgments of guilt for the defendant; whereas adding corresponding information regarding the defendant increased judgments of his guilt. Ratings of perceived similarity to defendant and victim correlated significantly with responsibility and guilt, but were unaffected by the information manipulation. We suggest that target information increases target salience, which results in an increase of attributions of responsibility.
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Papers by Daniel Rempala