A Level Psychology OCR Practice Exam

The combination of accent, race, and crime type in Dixon et al.'s study was found to be significant in influencing the perceptions of guilt. This study explored how different social factors could affect jury decisions and perceptions of individuals involved in criminal cases.

Accents play a crucial role in shaping people's biases and stereotypes; certain accents can invoke specific cultural associations, leading to prejudgments about a person's character. Race, similarly, introduces stereotypes that may influence how individuals perceive the likelihood of guilt based on societal biases. Crime type also contributed, as different categories of crime can evoke varying levels of fear or disdain in people, further affecting how they assess a defendant’s guilt.

The interplay of these three factors – their collective impact rather than any single factor alone – resulted in noticeably higher guilt ratings. This emphasizes the importance of considering multiple sociolinguistic and demographic factors when evaluating judgments in the context of legal settings, particularly how biases might skew the perception of guilt or innocence.