Psychological mechanisms influencing the public’s punitive attitudes toward blue-collar and white-collar crimes: the mediating effects of perceived threat, perceived competitiveness and class-based punishment.

• Main Authors: Chen, Yan-Jen, 陳彥禎
• Other Authors: 李怡青
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/xf64x6

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 心理學系 === 107 === While most of the previous research concerning punitive attitudes of the public focused on blue-collar crimes and concluded that people are more punitive toward blue-collar offenders than white-collar offenders, the factors and psychological mechanisms contributing this attitude differences remain unclear. Based on two pro-punitive ideologies and the psychological mechanisms behind them, this thesis tested whether people with high right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) perceive blue-collar and white-collar offenders to be danger to society, competitive to ingroup's resources, or hoping to punish them based on the offenders’ social status, thus tend to have higher or lower punitive attitudes toward them. First, we found that it is the "act", not the "social status", influences people's punitive attitudes toward blue-collar and white-collar offenders. Furthermore, two studies both showed that people in Taiwan are more punitive toward white-collar offenders than blue-collar offenders, which is inconsistent to most of conclusions of previous researches. As the impact of psychological mechanisms, Study 1 and Study 2 showed that individuals with high RWA perceived blue-collar offenders and white-collar offenders who caused physical harms both to be dangerous to the society, and hoping to punish blue-collar and white-collar offenders based on their social status, thus have higher punitive attitudes toward them. While study 2 found that individuals with high SDO would hope to punish blue-collar and white-collar offenders based on their social status, thus have higher punitive attitudes toward them, the relationship between SDO and perceived competitiveness toward blue-collar offenders is unstable. Lastly, we also found that only in the white-collar crime situation, the more people believe the crime is possible to occur in reality, the more punitive they will be toward white-collar offenders. We inferred that the differences of punitive attitude toward white-collar and blue-collar offenders might be due to the imaginary degree of the offenders’ act. This thesis attended to understand the punitive attitude of Taiwan’s public as well as the psychological mechanisms of it. Also, it attempted to fulfill the other side of current academic spectrum that mostly focused on public’s punitive attitudes toward blue-collar offenders with demographic factors as approach to explore factors influencing public’s punitive attitudes.