Complainant’s physical attractiveness and juristic judgments of blame and punishment in physical, domestic, and sexual assault scenarios

Abstract

Extralegal factors, including physical attractiveness, may bias juristic opinions. The present study provided 450 university students with hypothetical scenarios of physical, domestic, and sexual assault in which complainant’s attractiveness and other legal and extralegal characteristics were independently varied. Results indicate complainant’s attractiveness mattered in sexual assault scenarios only for guilt of the defendant, but not for physical or domestic assault. Complainant’s attractiveness was not related to perceptions of blameworthiness of complainant or punishment of defendant. Overall, legal factors of injury level, prior offending, and intoxication mattered more than attractiveness or race of the victim. Implications are discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.