Adolescents' attitudes toward the death penalty.

Lester, David ; Maggioncalda-Aretz, Maria ; Stark, Scott Hunter 等

Lester (1987) gave a list of twenty criminal acts to college students and police officers and found that the police officers checked an average of 10.7 acts as meriting the death penalty while the college students checked 8.6. The present Study was designed in part to explore how adolescents responded to this questionnaire as compared to college students.

In other research on attitudes toward the death penalty, Starr (1983) reported that women were less in favor of capital punishment than were men, while McKelvie (1983) reported that extraversion scores were positively associated with favoring the death penalty. The present study was also designed to explore whether gender and personality predict attitudes toward the death penalty.

METHOD

A questionnaire was administered anonymously to 142 high school students at two different high schools (72 boys and 70 girls; mean age 16.7 years (SD = 0.9), and 112 college students at a state college (36 men and 76 women; mean age 23.2 years, SD = 6.0). Part one of the questionnaire contained a list of 20 criminal acts (see Table 1) for each of which the respondents were to say whether they favored capital punishment (yes or no). In addition, the subjects were administered the short form of a questionnaire to assess extraversion and neuroticism (Jensen, 1958).

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The high school students checked an average of 11.86 criminal acts as deserving the death penalty as compared to 8.64 for the college students (t (234) = 4.76, two-tailed p [less than] .001). This difference was found for all twenty of the criminal acts (see Table 1), and statistically significant for sixteen of the acts.

Interestingly, the two groups agreed on the crimes most deserving the death penalty: a person who murders several people at different points in time, a person who tortures the victim before killing him/her, [TABULAR DATA FOR TABLE 1 OMITTED] a person who murders someone else's child, a person who kills' several people at once as in a bomb explosion or by setting fire to a building, and a person who assassinates the President of the United States.

For neither the high school nor the college students was gender associated with favoring capital punishment (Pearson rs = 0.06 and -0.01, respectively), nor age (rs = 0.08 and 0.02), extraversion scores (rs = 0.01 and 0.18) or neuroticism (rs = -0.05 and 0.01).

Thus, the major difference identified in this study was that high school students were more in favor of capital punishment than were college students, though they ranked crimes similarly in terms of meriting the death penalty. This raises two possibilities: that adolescents become less punitive after some college experience or that the more punitive high school students are less likely to go to college. Further research is needed to test the validity of these two possibilities.

REFERENCES

Jensen, A. R. (1958). The Maudsley Personality Inventory. Acta Psychologica, 14, 314-325.

Lester, D. (1987). The death penalty. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.

McKelvie, S. (1983) Personality and belief in capital punishment. Personality & Individual Differences, 4, 217-218.

Starr, J. (1983). Sex role orientation and attitudes toward institutional violence. Humanity & Society, 7, 127-148.