Belief in execution’s ineffectiveness or unfairness does not reduce support for it

Evidence

Attitudes toward the death penalty itself are also interesting. The public is highly skeptical that executions save lives. Only about a third of the public (34%) believe that executions reduce murder rates. A major share of the public (59%) believes that innocent individuals have been wrongfully executed, and a significant percentage (35%) is of the view that the death penalty is unfairly applied. However, in the aggregate, skepticism about deterrence, legal unfairness, and wrongful executions do not seem to diminish support of executions (Jones, 2006). The support is driven mainly by the desire for restitution and revenge. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1844

Categorization

• XREF: The finding that factual skepticism fails to dent punitive support is a strong mechanistic analogue to vault claims about ideological conviction surviving contrary evidence on immigration/Islamophobia. — connects to: Skepticism about deterrence does not reduce support for executions.; Personalizing a murderer weakens abstract support for executing them
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely striking datum: moral/punitive support is decoupled from the policy’s factual justification, suggesting the real driver is retributive emotion — a boundary on rational-information models of attitude change.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1844