Looking Deathworthy Essay
Gloria E. Wiggs 10/10/2011
Prof. Pearson
Intro to Sociology
Research Report: Looking Deathworthy
Researchers Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Paul G. Davis Valerie J. Purdie-Vaughns, and Sheri Lynn Johnson studied whether being stereotypically black influences the probability of receiving the death penalty. Sociologist have previously proven that people quickly apply racial stereotypes to blacks who have the stereotypically appearance of a black person. This racial profile effects how people judge an individual and this judgment may very well influence how one is treated by others. This study is important because it shows how racial stereotypes can affect the sentence given to a defendant guilty of murder. The relationship of the different sentences of black on black murders vs. black on white murders is also slightly exposed in this study. For science, this shows a new perspective of how modern society views and profiles African-American men. These stereotypes have and influence on how people treat one another, in this case African-American murder defendants, which is changing society as a …show more content…
The first method they showed pictures of 44 black males convicted of murdering white victims in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia during 1979 and 1999, and showing their pictures to raters. The raters where Stanford University undergraduates who were not told the men in the pictures where convicted murderers. They simply rated the men according to how stereotypically black they looked. The researchers found that the defendants who appeared to be more stereotypically black than the others were more likely to receive a death sentence. In the second method, they used the same databases and procedures to see if the same result would be obtained in the experiment if the victims were black. They found that the perceived stereo typicality of black defendants convicted of murdering black victims did not predict a death
Prof. Pearson
Intro to Sociology
Research Report: Looking Deathworthy
Researchers Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Paul G. Davis Valerie J. Purdie-Vaughns, and Sheri Lynn Johnson studied whether being stereotypically black influences the probability of receiving the death penalty. Sociologist have previously proven that people quickly apply racial stereotypes to blacks who have the stereotypically appearance of a black person. This racial profile effects how people judge an individual and this judgment may very well influence how one is treated by others. This study is important because it shows how racial stereotypes can affect the sentence given to a defendant guilty of murder. The relationship of the different sentences of black on black murders vs. black on white murders is also slightly exposed in this study. For science, this shows a new perspective of how modern society views and profiles African-American men. These stereotypes have and influence on how people treat one another, in this case African-American murder defendants, which is changing society as a …show more content…
The first method they showed pictures of 44 black males convicted of murdering white victims in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia during 1979 and 1999, and showing their pictures to raters. The raters where Stanford University undergraduates who were not told the men in the pictures where convicted murderers. They simply rated the men according to how stereotypically black they looked. The researchers found that the defendants who appeared to be more stereotypically black than the others were more likely to receive a death sentence. In the second method, they used the same databases and procedures to see if the same result would be obtained in the experiment if the victims were black. They found that the perceived stereo typicality of black defendants convicted of murdering black victims did not predict a death