Heinous Crime or Unfortunate Incident: Does Gender Matter?

This study replicates and extends earlier investigations of emotional displays of an offender influencing jurors’ sentencing judgments through identity inference. Prior studies of this phenomenon used only male perpetrators. However, culturally shared beliefs about emotion are strongly gendered. Thus, we investigate how the perpetrator’s gender moderates the relationship between emotional displays and sentencing. Results replicate results of previous studies—this time, for both men and women. Furthermore, the effect of a perpetrator’s emotional display of distress on observers’ judgment of criminal identity is stronger for male than female perpetrators. We introduce the concept of the emotion-display premium to account for the greater benefits males receive for their display of particular emotions and discuss the implications of these results for social psychology and the sociology of emotions.