crime 4

• When analysing markets, a range of assumptions are made about the rationality of economic agents involved in the transactions
• The Wealth of Nations was written

  1776
• Rational


  (in classical economic theory) economic agents are able to consider the outcome of their choices and recognise the net benefits of each one
• Rational agents will select the choice which presents the highest benefits
• Consumers act rationally by


  Maximising their utility
• Producers act rationally by


  Selling goods/services in a way that maximises their profits
• Workers act rationally by


  Balancing welfare at work with consideration of both pay and benefits
• Governments act rationally by


  Placing the interests of the people they serve first in order to maximise their welfare
• Groups assumed to act rationally


  • Consumers
  • Producers
  • Workers
  • Governments
• Rationality in classical economic theory is a flawed assumption as people usually don't act rationally
• Marginal utility


  The additional utility (satisfaction) gained from the consumption of an additional product
• If you add up marginal utility for each unit you get total utility
• The Birmingham accent has attracted a lot of research and is currently evaluated more negatively than rural regional accents or 'received pronunciation' (RP)
• Seggie's (1983) study


  Perceptions of guilt of 3 accents - British RP, broad Australian and Asian
• Procedure


  Ps listened to tape recordings of the 'accused' pleading his innocence and were then asked to assess his guilt
• Accents did influence responses given by rater and this also depended on the type of crime (blue vs white-collar crime)
• More guilt attributed to the broad Australian accent when the suspect was accused of assault and more guilt attributed to the British RP accent when the suspect was accused of theft
• Blue-collar crime


  Crimes due to emotional outbursts, most notably anger and passion and result in injury to people or property i.e. burglary, theft, sex crimes, assault and drug crimes
• White-collar crime


  Crimes committed in a business setting, generally non-violent. They have been referred to as 'paper crimes' i.e. fraud, forgery, embezzlement
• Certain ethnic minorities are frequently negatively stereotyped to have characteristics that supposedly make them more inclined to take part in criminal behaviour
• Such negative stereotypes may influence how individuals on a jury may treat suspects from these ethnic minorities
• There were 646,292 arrests between April 2020 and March 2021 – over 30,000 fewer than the previous year
• Black people were over 3 times as likely to be arrested as white people – there were 29 arrests for every 1,000 black people, and 9 arrests for every 1,000 white people
• Black men were over 3 times as likely to be arrested as white men – there were 54 arrests for every 1,000 black men, and 15 arrests for every 1,000 white men
• White university students rated black defendants as more likely to be guilty than white defendants, and this effect was even stronger when the victim was described as white
• White Americans tended to see Simpson as guilty owing to the weight of evidence against him, while black Americans were more likely to interpret the presented evidence in terms of police misconduct
• Hedges


  "errrrmm" "I think" "perhaps"
• Witnesses who use 'hedges' while talking (e.g. I think/perhaps) or rise in intonation at the end of a sentence are perceived as less intelligent, less competent, less likeable and less believable than those who did not
• Mahoney & Dixon (1997) showed that defendants with a 'Brummie' accent were perceived as more guilty than defendants with 'non-Brummie' accents, and that a 'black Brummie' accent was perceived as the most guilty, especially for blue-collar crimes i.e. theft
• The aim of the Dixon et al. (2002) study was to test the hypothesis that a Brummie-accent (associated with a working-class culture) suspect would produce stronger attributions of guilt than a standard-accented suspect, and to test whether the race of the suspect and the type of crime would influence this effect
• Participants who grew up in Birmingham were excluded from the Dixon et al. (2002) study
• Independent measures


  Each participant only experienced one condition of the experiment
• Independent variables in the Dixon et al. (2002) study

  • Accent (Brummie or standard)
  • Race (Black or white)
  • Type of crime (armed robbery [blue collar] or cheque fraud [white collar])
• Dependent variable


  Participants' attributions of guilt, operationalised using a 7 point scale
• Procedure


  1. Participants listened to a 2 minute tape recording of a mock interview reportedly held in a British police station in 1995

  2. The role of suspect was played by a student who could switch between Brummie and standard accents

  3. The description of the suspect by the police inspector was changed to either black or white in the script
• Procedure


  Participants first rated the suspect's guilt on a 7 point scale, then they rated the suspect more generally by completing the Speech Evaluation Instrument
• The Brummie accent was rated higher on guilt than the suspect with standard accent
• Black participants were not rated significantly more guilty than white participants
• Blue collar participants were not rated significantly more guilty than white-collar participants
• The participants in the black, Brummie accent blue-collar crime condition received the highest guilt rating