Abstract

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Does evidence of a biomechanical cause of psychopathy reduce sentencing to the same extent for male and female judges? A recent experiment found that when psychiatric evidence of criminal psychopathy was supplemented by evidence of an underlying biomechanism, judges assigned shorter average sentences and were more likely to cite at least one mitigating factor of psychopathy in accompanying written opinions. But it remains unclear whether the absence of neurobiological evidence justifies the retention of longer sentences, and unclear whether the opinions of this judicial sample are widely held, or reflect the unique demographics of the U.S. state trial judiciary. Specifically, previous research has found systematic differences in the credence that men and women give to different kinds of scientific explanations, and this research suggests that the discovered scientism among U.S. state trial judges may be moderated by the gender ratio of that population, which is skewed heavily toward men. Here, a reanalysis of the data in which this effect was first revealed found no effect of biomechanism on female judges’ sentencing or opinions. These results suggest that it is worth further investigating whether the overrepresentation of men on the bench may lead to a hard-scientific bias in U.S. state courts. Additionally, the findings highlight the need to develop a scientific understanding of the social forces that give rise to these gender differences in the first place, and reveal problems with a concept that I develop and critique called the principle of epistemic caution.