Public attitudes toward sex offenders and their relationship to personality traits and demographic characteristics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present study examined public attitudes toward the sentencing, treatment, management, and perceived dangerousness of sex offenders. Seventy-eight university undergraduates completed a 25-item attitude toward sex offenders survey developed for the present study, along with a five-factor measure of personality (NEO Personality Inventory - Revised), a demographic questionnaire, and the Paulhus Deception Scale, to control for social desirability. While participants most frequently endorsed the belief that sentences were not sufficiently severe, they tended to espouse treatment and risk management alternatives to longer sentences and eschewed exceptionally severe punishments (e.g., surgical castration). Participants estimated high rates of sexual recidivism (59%), although they also estimated significantly lower recidivism rates for treated offenders. Results of a principle components analysis suggested that participant attitudes comprised two broad domains: systems attitudes (e.g., law enforcement, corrections, justice) and rehabilitative attitudes. Although few demographic differences emerged in participant attitudes, 'openness to experience' and 'agreeableness' each significantly predicted more rehabilitative attitudes, while contrary to expectations, 'extraversion' was significantly associated with more negative systems-related attitudes. The results provide support that personality traits may be linked to important social attitudes, including those toward sex offenders.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".