Psychology and Justice: Is Justice Really Blind? (Part 1)

hello and welcome back to the world of psychology attractive and therefore not guilty is justice really blind everyone is equal before the law justice is blind yeah do you believe it probably not and you are absolutely right because besides the fact the richer you are the better lawyers you can afford there is also some bias according to attractiveness and there have been many studies on this topic also big meta analytic studies and let's just pick one study that's quite famous in this research field and it's been cited very often and it's the study by Stewart published in 1980 and the well-known Journal of applied social psychology in this study the physical attractiveness of 74 defendants in the Criminal Court was rated by observers and after the trials were over they just took a look what's the outcome and in fact they observed well the better the defendants looked like the more attractive they were rated the less severe the sentence imposed in fact the less attractive defendants were sent twice as often to prison than the really attractive ones very often when the study is cited this is all you get but there is a weakness in this study because there has also been a correlation between the attractiveness and the seriousness of the crime the more attractive persons committed less serious crimes so there's some kind of artificial effect and the influence of attractiveness on the severe nests of punishments is a little bit overrated and as this is a problem that can occur if you observe real-world trials scientists developed the research design of mock trials in which standardized trials are presented to mock URIs like it's been done for example in the study of colca and Kessler also published in the Journal of applied social psychology with the title is justice really blind the effect of litigant physical attractiveness on judicial judgment in this study 91 under graduates were playing the role of non deliberating euros in an automobile negligence trial in order to vary the factor attractiveness they were either shown a video in which the defendant was better-looking than the plaintiff in this case on average they said well the defendant has to pay about five thousand six hundred and twenty three dollars when the defendant was less attractive than the plaintiff they said on average well this was a severe damage he has to pay ten thousand and fifty one dollars so almost twice as much which is quite a remarkable result you