Keelah E.G. Williams, Assistant Professor of Psychology, originally hails from Australia but moved to Detroit, Michigan in the second grade. She attended Arizona State University for graduate school, where she attained both a Ph.D. in Philosophy and a Juris Doctor.
She has always been interested in the intersection of law and psychology. Over the summer, she published a paper in Evolution and Human Behavior entitled, “Capital and punishment: Resource scarcity increases endorsement of the death penalty.” It discusses the correlation between resource availability in certain areas and how the populace of those areas feel about the death penalty. The article was the culmination of four different studies performed over the last six years.
In an interview, Williams noted how a lack of resource availability can influence various behaviors among affected populations, including reproductive timing and race-based judgments. When resources are scarce — a phenomenon that correlates with economic instability and insecurity — people tend to feel less confident in their future situation and choose to have children at younger ages. Another pattern Williams noted in her research is people’s tendency to be less inclusive of others when resource scarcity occurs. For example, in a situation of resource scarcity, white people are more likely to label an ethnically ambiguous person as non-white. As resources become scarcer, Williams explains, people tend to be more exclusive so as to avoid having to share few resources among many people.
In the first study, Williams and her co-authors investigated the relationship between a nation’s Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) and the legality of the death penalty. The IHDI differs from Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a similar measure, in that it takes into consideration how resources have been distributed throughout a country. Williams and her fellow researchers found a positive correlation between resource scarcity within a country and legal endorsement of capital punishment, though they did not investigate popular opinion regarding the death penalty. The second study took a similar approach and explored the relationship between GDP of a state and the legal status of capital punishment. Again, researchers found a positive correlation between resource scarcity and the legality of the death penalty.
These studies acted as proof of concept for the ideas behind the paper but, because they were not experimental in nature, could not support a causative link between the phenomena of resource scarcity and a legal death penalty. To test their hypotheses, Williams and her co-authors conducted a two further studies. In one, the researchers manipulated subjects’ perception of resource scarcity. Half of the participants were given articles that gave a negative outlook on the stability of the economy, while the other half were given articles with a more positive outlook on the economy. This study supported their hypothesis that those who read the negative article were more likely to approve of the death penalty, while those that read the positive article disapproved.
In the final study, Williams and her team interrogated the possible driving forces behind the experiment’s results. They concluded that in resource-rich situations, people are more willing to give offenders the chance to rehabilitate. When fewer resources are available, people are less willing to risk devoting resources to others’ rehabilitation and are therefore more likely to support the death penalty.
Professor Williams is currently working with a Hamilton student on a new project that explores the role that contempt and anger play in people’s endorsement of policies. Although the difference between the two is subtle, contempt is defined as the feeling that a given person has nothing more to offer you, while anger is defined as disappointment, but that reparations can be made after some punishment has been dealt.
Interested readers can find more information about the subject of this article in the upcoming episode of the podcast Discussions with DPIC, which includes an interview with Professor Williams. It will be available via iTunes or deathpenaltyinfo.org within the week.
