What is it about?
This study explores whether emotions like empathy affect decisions in court. Looking at over 900,000 real sentencing records and conducting two experiments, the authors found that people naturally empathize with victims and often dehumanize defendants. Surprisingly, hearing the emotional stories of victims didn’t seem to increase harshness in sentencing, perhaps because people already empathize with them by default. But when people heard the defendant’s perspective, they were more likely to see them as human and recommend lighter sentences.
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Why is it important?
This research challenges the belief that removing emotion makes legal decisions more fair. Instead, it shows that emotion already plays a hidden role: people often feel for victims without prompting, but overlook the humanity of defendants. Uniquely, the study combines national-level incarceration data with experiments and shows that giving voice to both sides can restore an emotional balance. This work offers a powerful argument that “empathic defaults” are part of legal decision making and that introducing, rather than ignoring, emotional perspectives may balance the emotional scales.
Perspectives
As a clinical psychology researcher and therapist, I’ve seen firsthand how deeply people are shaped by their life stories. Yet in courtrooms, we often reduce people to labels: victim, criminal, defendant. This project came from a desire to humanize those labels. I wanted to understand how emotional narratives, like the ones I hear every day from clients, might shift public perception of behavior. There is always more to everyone's story and this work proposes that justice can exist when every voice is heard.
Isabella Kahhale
University of Pittsburgh
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Balancing emotional scales: Empathy and dehumanization in legal contexts., Emotion, July 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/emo0001559.
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