Public Opinion on the Death Penalty:
Personality and Social-Psychological Factors
George Bishop and Dmitriy Poznyak1
University of Cincinnati and Mathematica Policy Research
Americans have long been divided over the utility, justice and morality of the death
penalty. Though support for capital punishment has declined somewhat in recent
years (Figure 1), in significant part because of death-row inmates later being
exonerated by DNA evidence, a sizable majority (63%) of Americans continues to
favor the death penalty (Jones, 2014). A majority (60%) of Americans also believes
that it is morally acceptable to impose the death penalty despite multiple botched
executions in recent times (Swift, 2015). Republicans, moreover, remain much
more likely than Democrats to say the death penalty is morally acceptable: 76% vs.
43%. What explains this remarkable partisan gap and the persistence of public
support for capital punishment? Asked why they favor it, a plurality typically
offers “an eye for an eye” as the number one “reason” for punishing people
convicted of murder (Swift, 2014). Is it all just a matter of retribution or revenge?
It’s a bit more complicated than that. Besides, contemporary, cognitive
neuroscience tells us that people [including our respondents] simply do not have
conscious access to the causal reasons for their attitudes, preferences or behavior
(cf. Gazzaniga, 2011, for an accessible account). They’re clueless.
But psychologists and social scientists have discovered some useful predictors of
death penalty attitudes and perhaps some explanatory factors as well. Given the
ready availability of secondary data archives such as the American National
Election Studies (ANES) and the NORC GSS, previous research on attitudes
toward the death penalty— what psychologists Carlsmith and Darley (2008) call
“retributive justice”—has focused heavily on the social and demographic correlates
of punitiveness. Unnever and Cullen’s (2009) review of the literature, as well their
own research on death penalty attitudes (Unnever and Cullen, 2010), for example,
1George Bishop is a retired professor of political science and currently a non-matriculating “graduate
student” in the Center for Adult Learning at U.C. Dmitriy Poznyak is a statistician at Mathematica in
Princeton.
indicates that the most consistent socio-demographic predictors of variations in
support for the death penalty are political ideology, religion, and race. Not
surprisingly, those who identify themselves as political conservatives are much
more likely to support capital punishment than self-identified liberals or moderates.
As Unnever and Cullen summarize the social-psychological argument on the
source of these differences, conservatives tend to attribute the cause of homicide to
the murderer’s dispositional characteristics, whereas liberals are more likely to
attribute it to socio-economic and situational factors.
The influence of religion on support for capital punishment arises from a more
complex interaction among those with: (1) different religious affiliations (cf.
Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Christian fundamentalists); (2) different religious
beliefs—with empathy, compassion, forgiveness and a close psychological
relationship with God decreasing support for the death penalty and rigidity of
religious beliefs increasing it; and (3) different religious practices. Those who
practice their religion more intensely through prayer and attendance at religious
services tend to be much more compassionate, forgiving and less supportive of
capital punishment. Suffice it to say that people of different religious persuasions,
beliefs and practices can almost always find some plausible, religion-based
justification for taking, or sparing, the life of a convicted murderer.
But the single best socio-demographic predictor of support for the death penalty in
the USA continues to be race, with African-Americans being significantly less
likely than white Americans to favor capital punishment, even when variations in
socio-economic status, region of residence (South vs. non-south), urban-nonurban
residence, political ideology, religiosity and fear of crime are rigorously controlled
(Unnever and Cullen, 2009). Above and beyond the influence of race as a “master
status” variable, Cullen and his colleagues have demonstrated that white racism, in
particular beliefs and attitudes reflecting racial resentment (e.g. blacks don’t work
or try hard enough), remains the strongest and most consistent predictor of punitive
attitudes, including the use of the death penalty.
Individual differences in personality and social-psychological variables, however,
have received noticeably less empirical attention in death penalty research (but see
Kandola and Egan, 2014). Nevertheless, the perennial personality construct of
authoritarianism—variously operationalized—has continued to be a significant
predictor of death penalty attitudes, when utilized in multivariate analyses of
support for capital punishment (cf. McCann, 2008; Stack, 2003; Unnever and
Cullen, 2010). Social dominance orientation as a personality variable, a second
[independent] dimension of authoritarianism—the “other authoritarianism,” as it is
sometimes called—has likewise emerged as an important source of psychological
support for the death penalty, punitiveness and socio-political attitudes more
generally (Duckitt, 2009; Ho et al., 2012; Pratto et al., 1994; Sidanius et al., 2006).
Authoritarianism, in whatever form, thus remains alive and well as a predictor and
explanatory factor, despite rumors of its demise as a vital theoretical construct in
contemporary social psychology.
Current Project
In this project we focused on various personality and social-psychological
measures in the 2012 ANES that we deemed as having high face validity and direct
relevance to Duckitt’s (2009) causal model of socio-political attitudes such as
punitiveness (e.g. death penalty), racial intolerance, resentment or prejudice, as
mediated through a dangerous/threatening worldview and the two forms of
authoritarianism: traditional Right Wing and social dominance (Duckitt, 2009,
Figure 5.1, p.85). Using these and other available measures and control variables
that we could identify in the ANES, we have built a working, structural equation
model (SEM) of support for the death penalty, one that can readily be replicated
and extended by other investigators.
Methods
The data for our project were drawn from the American National Election Studies
(http://www.electionstudies.org/). The ANES is a data-collection program and
collaboration of Stanford University and the University of Michigan, which
includes 'core' measures of public opinion, political attitudes, voting and political
participation that are designed for both cross-sectional and time-trend studies.
Measures
In addition to the standard ANES question (s) used to measure direction and
strength of support for vs. opposition to the death penalty, we constructed indices
and scales for the following latent constructs: Authoritarian Traditionalism, Social
Dominance/Anti-Egalitarianism, Dangerous/Threatening World Beliefs, Racial
Resentment, Political Identity, Religiosity and the Conscientiousness/Critical
Personality (see Appendix). We also included standard demographic control
variables: age, race, gender and education.
Analysis
To model associations between support for capital punishment and respondents’
personality, social-psychological attitudes and demographic characteristics, we
used a structural equation modeling approach (Mplus; Muthén and Muthén 19982012). Our SEM model with a mix of categorical and continuous items estimated
direct and indirect effects in Mplus (v. 7.1, Muthén and Muthén 1998-2012), using
the Weighted Least Squares Mean and Variance (WLSMV) estimator. The
adequacy of the models was assessed by examining their global-, local- and
conceptual fit to the data. Estimated latent variables demonstrated acceptable
reliability (McDonald’s Omega) that ranged from .580 (Conscientious/Critical
Personality) to .817 (Racial Resentment):
Authoritarian Traditionalism Scale (Omega reliability ωr =.602)
SDO/Anti-Egalitarianism (ωr =.780)
Political Identity (ωr=.780)
Racial Resentment (ωr=.817)
Conscientious/Critical Personality (ωr=.580)
Dangerous/Threatening Worldview (ωr=.602)
Religiosity (ωr =.600)
The percent of variation explained in these latent variables –by the observed items
that measure these constructs, as well as other latent and observed variables—
ranged from .46 (Threatening/Dangerous Worldview) to Authoritarian
Traditionalism (.89).2
2 Conformity and Religiosity are endogenous variables for which R2 cannot be estimated
Causal Model
Based, in part, on Duckitt’s (2009) model of socio-political attitudes such as
punitiveness, we theorized that support for the death penalty could be explained by
two principal causal pathways: (1) one running indirectly from views of the world
as a threatening and dangerous place through the personality disposition of
traditional authoritarianism and (2) the other path indirectly through the dimension
of social dominance/anti-egalitarianism. These personality dispositions, in turn,
should affect support for the death penalty both directly and indirectly via their
influence on political identity and racial resentment attitudes . Other background
personality and socio-demographic factors are likewise specified in the model (see
Figure 2 below).
Results
Our SEM model provides a relatively good fit to the data. Root mean square error
of approximation (RMSEA) is .049 (95% C.I. .048 - .050); Comparative Fit Indix
(CFI) is .86 and the Tucker Lewis Index is .84. While we would prefer the CFI and
TLI indices to exceed .90, in practice these indices can be attenuated by the
average magnitude of correlations in the model (which, in turn, tend to be lower in
the SEM models that include both measurement and regression parts compared to
factor-analytic models consisting only of the measurement part with strongly
correlated items) and model complexity (see Figure 2)
Our model explains 30% of the variation in overall support for capital punishment.
In this model a view of the world as threatening and dangerous had the most
pronounced (standardized) direct and indirect effects on support for the death
penalty. On average, those who scored one standard deviation (SD) lower on
Threatening/Dangerous Worldview beliefs (i.e., with less belief in a
threatening/dangerous world ) scored 0.9 SD units lower on support for the death
penalty (i.e. opposed it).
Authoritarian traditionalism had the second largest direct and indirect effect on
support for capital punishment. A one S.D. increase on the authoritarian scale led
to a .52 S.D. increase in support for the death penalty. Racial resentment attitudes
had the third largest direct effect (-.39 S.D.), indicating that respondents with
higher scores on the racial resentment scale also tended to support the death
penalty, followed by the direct effects of Religiosity (-.22) and SDO/AntiEgalitarianism (.20). The Conscientious/Critical personality trait (-.08 S.D.) and
Political Identity (-.10 S.D.) had the lowest effects on support for the death penalty.
Overall, we found that the effect of authoritarian traditionalism on support for the
death penalty attitude was stronger than the effect of SDO/anti-egalitarianism.
Conclusion and Discussion
Our working model, we think, is off to a good start. We’ve introduced several
promising measures of personality and social-psychological constructs that appear
to explain and predict (directly and indirectly) more variation in death penalty
attitudes than the standard demographic suspects. Building on Unnever and
Cullen’s work (2009, 2010), we have demonstrated that racial resentment attitudes
— the strongest and most consistent predictor of death penalty attitudes in their
models—is best viewed as a direct manifestation of authoritarian traditionalism
and indirectly as an effect of viewing the world as a threatening or dangerous
place, a paranoiac worldview that has long been associated with Right-Wing
Authoritarianism as conceptualized and operationalized by Bob Altemeyer (1996,
2004). In this way, we’ve now begun constructing a more comprehensive,
personality and social-psychological account of support for capital punishment in
the USA.
But we have miles to go before we sleep. Our current model explains only 30% of
the total variance. That leaves a lot left on the table. If all our psychological
constructs had been included in previous ANES surveys over the past fifty years or
so—along with measures of attitudes towards the death penalty— we could now
introduce time period as an explanatory variable and boost the r-squared for our
model significantly, as another glance at Figure 1 will show. Alas…no such
measures exist over time. There’s the NORC GSS, of course, where opinions about
the death penalty have been assessed for over 40 years (1974). But the GSS does
not include measures of several of the personality and social-psychological
constructs we identified in the 2012 ANES (cf. Bishop and Poznyak, 2015). Yet,
we’re not greedy; in fact, we’re grateful for the measures that are available in these
ongoing survey data collection programs and can always lobby for more such
items.
The death penalty may be on death row itself given recent trends in court decisions
and stays of execution. But it’s not dead by any means in the court of public
opinion. And depending upon the future partisan composition of state legislatures,
governors’ offices and the courts themselves, the death penalty may have a lot of
legs left. So explaining its public support remains an enduring, empirical
challenge, especially given that we can account for just a little less than a third of
it.
Figure 1.
Source: http://www.gallup.com/poll/186218/solid-majority-continue-supportdeathpenalty.aspx?g_source=death
%20penalty&g_medium=search&g_campaign=tiles
Figure 2: SEM Model of Support for the Death Penalty
Data: American National Election Studies (ANES) 2012. N = 5,781
Note: Observed indicators of latent variables were omitted for the sake of
clarity.
Fully standardized parameter estimates. *** Significant at p < .001. Pointed
arrows show residual variation in latent variables.
Model fit indices: RMSEA: .049 (95% C.I. .048 - .050); CFI = .86; TLI = .84;
APPENDIX
Death Penalty Attitude
“Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder
(strongly or not strongly)?”
In addition to the standard ANES question (s) used to measure direction and
strength of support vs. opposition to the death penalty, we constructed the
following scales and indices.
Authoritarian Traditionalism
We constructed a scale based on responses to the following five questions in the
2012 ANES.
1. “Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have:
independence or respect for elders?”
2. “Which one is more important for a child to have: curiosity or good manners?”
[“Now we are going to show you several statements about society in general. After
each one, we would like you to say how strongly you agree or disagree.”]
3. “The newer lifestyles are contributing to the breakdown of our society.”
4. “We should be more tolerant of people who choose to live according to their
own moral standards, even if they are very different from our own.”
5. “This country would have many fewer problems if there were more emphasis on
traditional family ties.”
Social Dominance/Anti-Egalitarianism
We measured the anti-egalitarianism dimension of social dominance (see Ho et al.,
2012) with responses to the following three items:
[“I am going to read several more statements. After each one, I would like you to
tell me how strongly you agree or disagree. The first statement is:]
1. “We have gone too far in pushing equal rights in this country.”
2. “This country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people
are.”
3. “It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life
than others.”
Dangerous/Threatening World Beliefs
Beliefs about how threatening or dangerous the world seems to a respondent were
determined by responses to the following three questions:
1. “During the next 12 months, how likely is it that there will be a terrorist attack in
the United States that kills 100 or more people? Is it[extremely…not at all likely]?”
2. “Do you think the federal government's powers pose a threat to the rights and
freedoms of ordinary citizens, or not? [extremely…slightly threatening]?”
3. During the last year do you think the position of the U.S. in the world has gotten
stronger or weaker?
Racial Resentment
Three items assessed the degree of racial resentment felt towards Black Americans:
[“Now I'm going to read several more statements. After each one, I would like you
to tell me how strongly you agree or disagree.”]
1. 'Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and
worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.”
2. “Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.”
3. “It's really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only
try harder they could be just as well off as whites.”
Political Identity
This index was created by combining responses to two standard questions in the
ANES: liberal-conservative identification and party identification:
1. “We hear a lot of talk these days about liberals and conservatives. Here is a
seven-point scale on which the political views that people might hold are arranged
from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. Where would you place yourself
on this scale, or haven't you thought much about this? [extremely liberal…
conservative]?”
2. “Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Democrat, a
Republican, an independent, or what? [strong or not very strong/closer to
Republican or Democratic party]?”
Religiosity
This two-item index was similarly constructed by combining responses to two
questions: beliefs about the Bible and church attendance.
1. “Which of these statements comes closest to describing your feelings about the
Bible? 1. The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for
word. 2. The Bible is the word of God but not everything in it should be taken
literally, word for word. 3. The Bible is a book written by men and is not the word
of God.”
2. “Do you go to religious services every week, almost every week, once or twice a
month, a few times a year, or never?”
Conscientious-Critical Personality
This personality trait was assessed by responses to the following four items:
"We’re interested in how you see yourself. Please mark how well the following
pair of words describes you, even if one word describes you better than the other:
1. 'dependable, self-disciplined' describes me [extremely poorly…extremely
well].”
2. ‘disorganized, careless' describes me [extremely poorly…extremely well].”
3. 'critical, quarrelsome' describes me [extremely poorly…extremely well].”
4. ‘sympathetic, warm' describes me [extremely poorly…extremely well].”
Socio-Demographics
The standard demographic control variables for the analysis included: age, race,
gender, and education.
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