What You Did Only Matters if You Are One of Us
Offenders’ Group Membership Moderates the Effect of Criminal History on Punishment Severity
Abstract
Research has demonstrated that repeat offenders are generally punished more severely than first-time offenders. In the present article, we argue that this should particularly be true if the offender is a member of one’s own social category. A group of 86 students were told about a fellow student who hid books from the university library. The student was either an ingroup or an outgroup member and was either a first-time or a repeat offender. As expected, repeat ingroup offenders were more severely punished than first-time ingroup offenders; this effect was mediated by anger/outrage and societal concerns. If the offender was an outgroup member, however, criminal history did not influence punitive reactions.
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