Looking Deathworthy Essay

Researchers Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Paul G. Davis Valerie J. Purdie-Vaughns, and Sheri Lynn Johnson studied whether being stereotypically black influences the probability of receiving the death penalty. Sociologist have previously proven that people quickly apply racial stereotypes to blacks who have the stereotypically appearance of a black person. This racial profile effects how people judge an individual and this judgment may very well influence how one is treated by others. This study is important because it shows how racial stereotypes can affect the sentence given to a defendant guilty of murder. The relationship of the different sentences of black on black murders vs. black on white murders is also slightly exposed in this study. For science, this shows a new perspective of how modern society views and profiles African-American men. These stereotypes have and influence on how people treat one another, in this case African-American murder defendants, which is changing society as a whole. Judgment plays a major role in how we interact with one another. The researchers had a very basic research design. There topic was if being stereotypically black influences the possibility of being sentenced with the death penalty. They defined there problem by stating how previous researchers have found a correlation between racial profiling and how people judge others. Researchers have also found that murders of white victims are more likely than murderers of black victims to be sentenced to death. The article Looking Deathworthy by the researchers that conducted this experiment, states that the researchers reviewed plenty of previous studies, theories, and cases. They conducted the experiment in two methods. The first method they showed pictures of 44 black males convicted of murdering white victims in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia during 1979 and 1999, and showing their pictures to raters. The raters where Stanford University undergraduates who were not told the men in the pictures where convicted murderers. They simply rated the men according to how stereotypically black they looked. The researchers found that the defendants who appeared to be more stereotypically black than the others were more likely to receive a death sentence. In the second method, they used the same databases and procedures to see if the same result would be obtained in the experiment if the victims were black. They found that the perceived stereo typicality of black defendants convicted of murdering black victims did not predict a death sentence. There were a couple of limitations made by these researchers that might have effect the outcome of the research. The researchers only used black defendants from the Pennsylvania and Philadelphia area. These changes make the research only correct for that area at that particular time. They should have broadened their case studies to all the states in the U. S. the researchers also only used raters from Standford University. There is a greater chance the people from the same area and same age group judge individuals with the same mentality. They should have used different age groups and people from different backgrounds as raters. T would have made the study more valid. I feel that this was an excellent theory to experiment and I agree that it is true. Capital punishment does give harder sentences for murder defendants who look stereotypically black. However, the study should have been broader. The researchers had variables that if they removed, would have allowed their findings to be more valid.