Project Description:
Patricia Ferreira, graduate student in Psychology, collaborated with Dr. Twila Wingrove on her project to assess whether framing rape as a hate crime can increase conviction rates and reduce complainant blame ratings in a mock rape trial. Ferreira employed a 2 (gender) x 2 (framing: hate crime, interpersonal) factorial design and ran a binary logistic regression and an ANOVA to analyze data. Participants completed the study online, where they read a stranger rape case vignette followed by a legal definition that was either framed as an interpersonal or hate crime definition. Lastly, participants answered questions about their impressions of what they read. Ferreira found that the hate crime definition had no impact on conviction, though it did reduce overall complainant blame, which supported one of our hypotheses. Compared to the interpersonal crime definition, the hate crime definition lowered complainant blame ratings assigned by men. Ferreira's study was accepted for presentation at the 2020 American Psychology-Law Society Annual Conference and she received Office of Student Research funding to support poster printing.
Patricia Ferreira
Graduate student in Psychology
Twila Wingrove
Ph.D., Experimental Psychology Program Director, Associate Professor
Department of Psychology