They deserve it. Exploring psycho-social attitudes toward convicted criminals.

How often do convicted criminals are unfairly judged and treated because of their group membership? The goal of the current research is to investigate social attitudes toward unfairly incarcerated individuals and how they vary depending on the ethnicity and skin color of the target. Two studies were run in two different contexts. Study 1 (n=256, October 2023) was conducted in Italy and results displayed that the most negative attitudes were shown toward the Tunisinian target (compared to the Italian and Romanian ones). This pattern of results was particularly relevant to individuals scoring high in levels of right-wing authoritarianism (Duckitt & Sibley, 2007). Study 2 was then run in Brazil (n=286, February 2024), where we manipulated both convicts’ skin color (Black vs White) - rather than their ethnicity - and their actual culpability (Guilty vs Innocent), in order to include in the design also a control condition and try to replicate the results of Study 1. Unexpectedly, the White target was the one to be more poorly evaluated, displaying a pattern of results opposite to what was initially hypothesized. This may be attributed to the inadequate composition of the sample or to their awareness of the scope of the research, but further investigation is needed in order to clarify the meaning of these results and then integrate them with those found in the Italian context.