Countering Pro-Death Penalty Attitudes

The death penalty has been an exigent issue in today’s prison reform efforts. In this study, we tested two methods of changing people’s minds about the death penalty to see which resulted in greater change of pro-death penalty attitudes. We tested the innocent-risk argument which asserts that there is a risk of killing an innocent person through the use of the death penalty. We also tested the deterrence-risk argument which asserts that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent. Through a randomized between-subjects design with a control condition, we found that the innocent-risk condition was more likely to decrease pro-death penalty attitudes.Ope