Will You Snitch? The Effects of Perpetrator Gender and Crime  Severity on Perceived Stress and Likelihood of Reporting a Crime
Siearah Robles (Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Psychological Science ‘20, Advisors: Dr. Jeanine Skorinko and Dr. Angela Rodriguez
Did your findings surprise you?
Siearah you can answer this or ignore, I was testing the feature 🙂
I was surprised by the difference between the amount of reporting on the male and female confederate within the mouse pad condition. Although our data did not statistically support that there was a difference in reporting based on gender or severity, it was interesting to see that our participants reported the male mouse pad thief the most and the female mouse pad thief the least. This made me think that maybe gender might be taken into consideration more when the crime is not as severe, and in more severe crimes, people are treated more equally. In the future, we could look into different crimes and levels of severity.
Do you think the results would have changed if the crime was more severe?
For this project we wanted to keep the crime and its severity more simple by just having “high” and “low” and the crimes be as similar as possible. It would be interesting to see what would happen if the crime was more severe than theft, or if we had more levels, like “medium.” We found that witnesses perceived more stress in the high severity condition, so I would predict that for a more severe crime like armed robbery or assault, participants would experience even more stress. I also think more people would snitch as it would be more “acceptable” to do so. I do think it is possible that the results can be different with a more severe crime because of gender stereotypes within the criminal justice system. For example, violent crime is usually seen as more severe, but it is also a believed that women are less likely to commit them. This is something I would keep in mind for future research.
Do you the your results would have been different if the crime was more severe?
Comments sticking now, sorry for redundancy…
How was stress measured? Was it physiologically measured and if not would that have shifted the results?
Mike
Stress was measured using a perceived stress scale. Participants rated how much they agreed with a statement from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The statements were modified to be about current feelings and thoughts instead of within the past month or so, for example, “right now are you feeling confident about your ability to handle your personal problems?”
Originally the plan was to measure stress in salivary cortisol, but due to the pandemic and having to turn the study online, we were unable to do so. Being that we relied more on self-report, and the pandemic being a stressful factor outside of the study, it is possible that this could have shifted the results.