Belief in a Just World, Blaming the Victim, and Hate Crime Statutes
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Dhammika Dharmapala
The earliest economic theory of discrimination proposed the subsequently neglected idea of a "vicious circle" of discrimination (Myrdal, 1944). We draw on psychological evidence (that people derive utility from believing that the world is just) to propose a behavioral economic model in which the vicious circle envisaged by Myrdal can arise. We demonstrate the power of this approach through an application to the issue of whether and how to justify penalty enhancements for hate crimes against members of disfavored groups. The crucial assumption is that individuals engage in biased inference in order to preserve their Belief in a Just World, thus attributing the disproportionate victimization of a group to that group's negative characteristics, rather than to the hate-motivated preferences of offenders. In a simple two-period setting, we show that disproportionate victimization of the disfavored group in the first period can lead to additional crime against that group in the second period. The reason is that potential offenders' inferences about the victimized group's characteristics become more negative as a consequence of disproportionate victimization, raising the net benefits of crime against that group (under the assumption that the benefits of crime depend partly on the victimized group's perceived characteristics). Our main result is that penalty enhancements can reduce the social harm due to these extra crimes.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Macroeconomic Instability and Corporate Failure: The Role of the Legal System
- Prevention of Crime and the Optimal Standard of Proof in Criminal Law
- Does a Rise in Maximal Fines Increase or Decrease the Optimal Level of Deterrence?
- Benchmarks and Economic Analysis
- Pass a Law, Any Law, Fast! State Legislative Responses to the Kelo Backlash
- The Problem of Shared Social Cost
- A Cost of Tax Planning
- Never Two Without Three: Commons, Anticommons and Semicommons
- Unavoidable Accident
- Protecting Private Property with Constitutional Judicial Review: A Social Welfare Approach
- Measuring Criminal Spillovers: Evidence from Three Strikes
- Corruption on the Court: The Causes and Social Consequences of Point-Shaving in NCAA Basketball
- Valuation of Quality of Life Losses Associated with Nonfatal Injury: Insights from Jury Verdict Data
- Belief in a Just World, Blaming the Victim, and Hate Crime Statutes
- Do Citizens Know Whether Their State Has Decriminalized Marijuana? Assessing the Perceptual Component of Deterrence Theory
- The Structure of Incremental Liability Rules
- Firms' Motivations for Environmental Overcompliance
- Contingent Fees, Signaling and Settlement Authority
- Rethinking the Economic Model of Deterrence: How Insights from Empirical Social Science Could Affect Policies Towards Crime and Punishment
- Crime, Business Conduct and Investment Decisions: Enterprise Survey Evidence from 34 Countries in Europe and Asia
- Additive and Non-Additive Risk Factors in Multiple Causation
- The Devil Made Me Do It: The Corporate Purchase of Insurance
- Factors Affecting the Length of Time a Jury Deliberates: Case Characteristics and Jury Composition
- Hybrid Licensing of Product Innovations
- The Effect of Endogenous Right-to-Work Laws on Business and Economic Conditions in the United States: A Multivariate Approach
- The Choice in the Lawmaking Process: Legal Transplants vs. Indigenous Law
- Building Encroachments
- Reporter's Privilege and Incentives to Leak
- Decision Analysis on Whether to Accept a Remittitur
- Deterrence in Rank-Order Tournaments
- Self-Defeating Subsidiarity
- Do Broader Eminent Domain Powers Increase Government Size?
