Balancing emotional scales: Empathy and dehumanization in legal contexts.

Abstract

Does emotional information have a place in court, or does it bias legal decisions? We address this longstanding question using real-world national sentencing patterns and laboratory-based mock jury decisions. Archival analysis of 918,152 observations reveals that the introduction of Victim Impact Statements, in which victims express the effect of crimes on their lives, did not change sentencing outcomes for violent crimes (Study 1). We hypothesized this may occur if observers empathize with victims over defendants by default. In two experimental studies (including a preregistered replication; data collected 2018 and 2019), exposure to the facts of a crime produced empathy for victims but dehumanization of defendants, a pattern not altered by Victim Impact Statements. Upon exposure to both the defendant's perspective and the victim's perspective, people express empathy for the victim and defendant, humanize defendants, and support more lenient sentencing. Internal meta-analyses of Study 2 and 3 found that the pooled effect of the defendant's perspective was much stronger than that of the victim, despite a content analysis demonstrating no significant difference in the emotionality or tone of the two statements. Taken together, the large and real-world sample of Study 1, combined with the experimental manipulation of Studies 2 and 3, suggests that "empathic defaults" are part of legal decision making and that introducing-rather than ignoring-multiple perspectives may balance the emotional scales. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).