New DPIC Podcast: Researcher Discusses Implications of Link Between Economic Threats and Support for Death Penalty

In the lat­est episode of our Discussions with DPIC pod­cast, Keelah Williams (pic­tured), assis­tant pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy at Hamilton College in New York, joins DPIC exec­u­tive direc­tor Robert Dunham to dis­cuss the impli­ca­tions of new research on the death penal­ty and resource scarci­ty.

“Resource scarci­ty” is a con­cept from evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy that exam­ines indi­vid­ual and social respons­es to envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions in which resources are lim­it­ed. “[E]cological vari­ables can affect our behav­ior in real­ly strik­ing ways, and this often is hap­pen­ing at an uncon­scious lev­el,” Williams said. She and an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary team of researchers from Arizona State University (where Williams earned her Ph.D. and J.D.) thought the con­cept pro­vid­ed ​“an excit­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty to see whether envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors might also play a role in how peo­ple think and feel about the death penalty.” 

Williams describes the team’s find­ings that coun­tries with greater resource scarci­ty and income inequal­i­ty are more like­ly to have a death penal­ty. The team dis­cov­ered a sim­i­lar phe­nom­e­non in the U.S., find­ing that ​“states with low­er life expectan­cy and low­er per capi­ta income were more like­ly to have the death penal­ty, and … this rela­tion­ship wasn’t explained by oth­er vari­ables like how polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive the states were or state murder rates.” 

Williams also dis­cuss­es two exper­i­men­tal stud­ies the team con­duct­ed to assess the extent to which per­cep­tions of eco­nom­ic scarci­ty or abun­dance affect indi­vid­u­als’ views of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. That research found that study par­tic­i­pants who had been shown infor­ma­tion and images of eco­nom­ic hard­ship tend­ed to be more sup­port­ive of the death penal­ty than those of the same polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy and socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus who had been giv­en infor­ma­tion and images about eco­nom­ic pros­per­i­ty. She explains the results, say­ing, ​“If your resources are lim­it­ed, then you have to be more choosy in how you invest them. So, in the con­text of pun­ish­ment deci­sions, we think this means you become less will­ing to risk repeat­ed offend­ing, and more favor­able towards pun­ish­ments that elim­i­nate the threat.” 

Although the team‘s research focused on resource scarci­ty, Williams says it also has rel­e­vance in explain­ing how race may affect views of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. ​“We think that peo­ple are try­ing to fig­ure out what the poten­tial future val­ue is of the offend­er because that’s the infor­ma­tion that helps them to eval­u­ate the costs and ben­e­fits of get­ting rid of some­one ver­sus keep­ing them around.” Race, and ​“whether some­one is in your ​‘in-group’ or your ​‘out-group,’” she says, ​“can play a role in these kinds of cal­cu­la­tions.” This, she believes, may lead to harsh­er pun­ish­ment of indi­vid­u­als per­ceived as belong­ing to the out-group and dis­cre­tionary acts of lenien­cy that favor indi­vid­u­als who are mem­bers of the in-group, and may cause indi­vid­u­als to feel more threat­ened when a mem­ber of their favored group is killed. 

Williams says that per­haps ​“the most inter­est­ing take-away from our study is that these fea­tures of our envi­ron­ment real­ly can influ­ence the way that we feel and the way that we behave, and can do so in ways we are not nec­es­sar­i­ly con­scious­ly aware are hap­pen­ing.” This rais­es prob­lem­at­ic con­sti­tu­tion­al and pol­i­cy ques­tions about the arbi­trari­ness of the death penalty’s appli­ca­tion across the United States. ​“If these extra­ne­ous fac­tors, like the state of the econ­o­my, are influ­enc­ing people’s atti­tudes about some­thing as impor­tant as how they feel about the death penal­ty and their will­ing­ness to impose death over life,” Williams says, “[t]hat’s some­thing we, as a soci­ety, need to con­sid­er if we’re comfortable with.”

Listen to the pod­cast here.