Unfair (41 page)

The disgust that people felt:
Willoughby,
Summary of Special Report
, 35, 57.

The physical disgust they felt:
Willoughby,
Summary of Special Report
, 4.

It matters every step:
Data gleaned from police and court records suggests that different victims receive different justice (and, in some cases, injustice), depending on key identifiers like age, gender, and race. Marc Riedel, “Homicide Arrest Clearances: A Review of the Literature,”
Sociology Compass
2, no. 4 (2008): 1150–59; Steven Briggs and Tara Opsal, “The Influence of
Victim Ethnicity on Arrest in Violent Crimes,”
Criminal Justice Studies: A Critical Journal of Crime, Law and Society
25, no. 2 (2012): 185–89; Aki Roberts, “The Influences of Incident and Contextual Characteristics on Crime Clearance of Nonlethal Violence: A Multilevel Event History Analysis,”
Journal of Criminal Justice
36 (2008): 65–69; Amanda L. Robinson and Meghan S. Chandek, “Differential Police Response to Black Battered Women,”
Women and Criminal Justice
12 (2000): 43–55; Douglas A. Smith, Christy A. Visher, and Laura A. Davidson, “Equity and Discretionary Justice: The Influence of Race on Police Arrest Decisions,”
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
75, no.1 (1984): 234, 246–49.

Despite what we say:
Goodwin and Landy, “Valuing Different Human Lives,” 778.

A ten-year-old is:
Goodwin and Landy, “Valuing Different Human Lives,” 796, 799.

Privileging the young:
Goodwin and Landy, “Valuing Different Human Lives,” 780.

But clearly there is a limit:
Goodwin and Landy, “Valuing Different Human Lives,” 778, 789.

When an older man:
Goodwin and Landy, “Valuing Different Human Lives,” 783, 785. A number of studies show that when an older person is killed, we do not feel the same sense of injustice as when a young person is killed. Mitchell J. Callan, Rael J. Dawtry, and James M. Olson, “Justice Motive Effects in Ageism: The Effects of a Victim's Age on Observer Perceptions of Injustice and Punishment Judgments,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
48 (2012): 1343–44. For instance, when researchers looked into how members of the public felt about an accident in which a drunk driver ran a red light and hit an innocent victim, they found that people perceived less injustice when a seventy-four-year-old was the victim than when an eighteen-year-old was the victim. And they recommended lower sentences for the guilty driver who hit the older person. This enhanced indifference may affect our response, even when we
face no tragic tradeoff, when there is just one victim on the ground and plenty of opportunity to help save his life and catch his attacker. Callan, Dawtry, and Olson, “Justice Motive Effects in Ageism,” 1343.

When researchers had people:
Pamela A. Dooley, “Perceptions of the Onset Controllability of AIDS and Helping Judgments: An Attributional Analysis,”
Journal of Applied Social Psychology
25, no. 10 (1995): 862–63; Sam Sommers,
Situations Matter
(New York: Riverhead Books, 2011), 79. In the real world, addicts tend to receive neither sympathy nor respect. It seems revealing that in Ambulance 18's official logbook, the EMTs describe another patient they picked up as “drunk and stupid.” Willoughby,
Summary of Special Report
, 50. People don't feel any need to hide their disdain for alcoholics and drug addicts, and this powerful aversion is strong enough to overcome official protocol. Howard's Emergency Department Triage Manual, for instance, explicitly states that an alcoholic who exhibits abnormal vital signs and altered mental state or is non-ambulatory must go to the main Emergency Department where staff members are advised to “urgently proceed.” Willoughby,
Summary of Special Report
, 16.

This is often the case:
Inbar and Pizarro, “Grime and Punishment,” 16–17; McNerney, “A Nauseating Corner of Psychology.”

Such associations can be:
Lasana T. Harris and Susan T. Fiske, “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low: Neuroimaging Responses to Extreme Out-Groups,”
Psychological Science
17, no. 10 (2006): 847.

In one demonstration:
Harris and Fiske, “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low,” 848–49, 852.

More interesting, though, was:
Harris and Fiske, “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low,” 848–52.

It lit up when:
Harris and Fiske, “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low,” 848–52.

But for those viewed:
Harris and Fiske, “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low,” 848–52.

Passing a homeless drunk:
Jones, “The Depths of Disgust,” 769–70.

The dehumanization is all the easier:
David's outgroup label was ultimately removed, but for many victims there is no opportuniuty to become “one of us.” Most are who they appear to be: a transgender prostitute stabbed by a pimp; an untouchable woman robbed and beaten. There is no veil to pull back that will make them worthy of our justice.

In one classic experiment:
Cathaleene Jones and Elliot Aronson, “Attribution of Fault to a Rape Victim as a Function of Respectability of the Victim,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
26, no. 3 (1973): 415–19.

Take a moment to ponder:
Jones and Aronson, “Attribution of Fault to a Rape Victim,” 417–18.

To unlock the mystery:
Callan, Dawtry, and Olson, “Justice Motive Effects in Ageism,” 1343–44. Jones and Aronson, “Attribution of Fault to a Rape Victim,” 418–19.

When confronted with:
Jones and Aronson, “Attribution of Fault to a Rape Victim,” 418–19.

And we eliminate that discomfort:
Jones and Aronson, “Attribution of Fault to a Rape Victim,” 418–19.

We trick ourselves:
Jones and Aronson, “Attribution of Fault to a Rape Victim,” 418–19.

She must have done something:
Jones and Aronson, “Attribution of Fault to a Rape Victim,” 418–19. The easier it is for us to see the implicated harm as resulting from the victim's free choice, the easier it is for us to blame her for what happened and maintain our belief in a just world. Looking into why certain tragedies, like the tsunami of 2004, spark significant charitable
giving, while others, like the crisis in Darfur, do not, a group of scientists had participants read about a fake famine and then asked them if they would like to make a donation to the victims. Hanna Zagefka et al., “Donating to Disaster Victims: Responses to Natural and Humanly Caused Events,”
European Journal of Social Psychology
41 (2011): 358, doi: 10.1002/ejsp.781; Situationist Staff, “The Situation of Donations,”
Situationist
, May 29, 2011,
http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/​2011/05/29​/the-situation-of-donations/
. Some participants were told that the famine had arisen from “drought,” while others were told that it had been sparked by “armed conflict.” Could that small background fact make a difference? The answer was a clear yes: those who were starving because of a drought received significantly more donations, which the authors suggested arose because these people were seen as less implicated in causing their own suffering. Zagefka et al., “Donating to Disaster Victims,” 358–59; Situationist Staff, “The Situation of Donations.” Again, we want to believe that the world is a just place where individuals get their righteous deserts. Zagefka et al., “Donating to Disaster Victims,” 361; Situationist Staff, “The Situation of Donations”; Callan, Dawtry, and Olson, “Justice Motive Effects in Ageism,” 1343–44. Participants could maintain such a belief by assuming that those suffering as a result of an “armed conflict” must have been partially to blame—something they couldn't do when a natural disaster was behind the famine. Zagefka et al., “Donating to Disaster Victims,” 361; Situationist Staff, “The Situation of Donations.”

A former co-worker:
“Suspect in Northern Liberties Shooting ID'd,”
6ABC.com
, November 18, 2011,
http://abclocal.go.com/​wpvi/story​?section=news/crime&id=8437751
.

Penn State students rioted:
Eric Randall, “Bullies Force an Alleged Sandusky Victim to Leave His High School,
Wire
, November 21, 2011,
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/​national/2011/​11/bullies-forced-alleged-sandusky-victim-leave-his-high-school/45267/
.

Another victim, who courageously came forward:
Pennsylvania Attorney General, “Child Sex Charges Filed Against Jerry Sandusky; Two Top Penn State University Officials Charged with Perjury and Failure to Report Suspected Child Abuse,” news release, November 5, 2011,
http://www.attorneygeneral.gov/​press.aspx?id=6270
; Randall, “Bullies Force an Alleged Sandusky Victim to Leave”; Sara Ganim, “Alleged Jerry Sandusky Victim Leaves School Because of Bullying, Counselor Says,”
Patriot-News
, November 20, 2011,
http://www.pennlive.com/​midstate/index.ssf​/2011/11/alleged_jerry_sandusky_victim.html
.

We may see child abuse:
Participants in the study on rape and respectability sentenced the defendant to a
longer
term of imprisonment for raping a married woman than raping a divorcee. And the experimenters reasoned that this was because the social harm was seen as worse in the case of the rape of a married woman (e.g., her husband was harmed as well). Jones and Aronson, “Attribution of Fault to a Rape Victim,” 418–19.

To do that, we may:
Jones and Aronson, “Attribution of Fault to a Rape Victim,” 418–19. This blame dynamic may help explain the seemingly unexplainable: the severe punishment of those who have
been raped
, including children and other innocents, in certain cultures around the world. In Somalia in 2008, for example, a thirteen-year-old girl was stoned to death in front of a thousand spectators after her father reported that she had been gang raped. Chris McGreal, “Somalian Rape Victim, 13, Stoned to Death,”
Guardian
, November 2, 2008,
http://www.theguardian.com/​world/2008​/nov/03/somalia-rape-amnesty
. In Sudan in 2013, an eighteen-year-old pregnant woman who was raped by seven men was then charged with adultery, prostitution, and committing indecent acts, which carried the death penalty. “Sudan: Gang Rape
Victim Found Guilty of ‘Indecent Acts,' ”
Sudan Tribune
, February 21, 2014,
http://www.sudantribune.com/​spip.php​?article50031
.

Why, then, do most:
Being able to rewrite our existing labels would certainly be beneficial, given that amending, reassessing, and sometimes rejecting our initial hypotheses in light of emerging facts is critical to reaching accurate conclusions. Dan Simon,
In Doubt: The Psychology of the Criminal Justice System
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 22.

Research suggests that once we have:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 23.

But really our minds are bending:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 37–38.

Say you learn that:
Claudia E. Cohen, “Person Categories and Social Perception; Testing Some Boundaries of the Processing Effects of Prior Knowledge,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
40, no. 3 (1981): 446.

Without any conscious effort:
Cohen, “Person Categories and Social Perception,” 447.

And if you know:
Nick D. Lange et al., “Contextual Biases in the Interpretation of Auditory Evidence,”
Law and Human Behavior
35 (2011): 180, 182–83.

In an experiment along these lines:
Nick D. Lange et al., “Contextual Biases,” 182–83.

In a great demonstration:
Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Nilanjana Dasgupta, and Tracy L. Banaszynski, “Believing Is Seeing: The Effects of Racial Labels and Implicit Beliefs on Face Perception,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
29 (2003): 363–66; Adam Alter, “Why It's Dangerous to Label People,”
Psychology Today
, May 17, 2010,
http://www.psychologytoday.com/​blog/alternative-truths​/201005/why-its-dangerous-label-people
.

What is incredible is that:
Eberhardt, Dasgupta, and Banaszynski, “Believing Is Seeing,” 367–68.

Medical research suggests:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 23.

Unfortunately, the impact:
Initial expectations can bias eyewitnesses and jurors, as well as interrogators, judges, and forensic scientists. Saul M. Kassin, Itiel E. Dror, and Jeff Kukucka, “The Forensic Confirmation Bias: Problems, Perspectives, and Proposed Solutions,”
Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition
2 (2013): 45.

“Tunnel vision” is an endemic:
Kassin, Dror, and Kukucka, “The Forensic Confirmation Bias,” 45–47. In about half of the post-conviction DNA exoneration cases that we know about, flawed forensic science was an important contributor to the wrongful conviction. Innocence Project, “DNA Exonerations Nationwide,” accessed February 15, 2014,
http://www.innocenceproject.org/​Content/DNA_Exonerations_Nationwide.php
; Innocence Project, “51% of 300 DNA Exonerations Involved Use of Improper/Unvalidated Forensic Science: Breakdown by Discipline,” accessed February 15, 2014,
http://www.innocenceproject.org/​docs/FSBreakdownDiscipline.pdf
.