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Criminal Justice

Accent stereotypes can influence judgments about guilt, study finds

By Debra Cassens Weiss

January 27, 2025, 12:55 pm CST

A British study has found that people with accents linked to higher social status were generally judged less likely to commit crimes.

Working-class accents, on the other hand, were more likely to be associated with criminality, according to a Jan. 16 press release here and a Jan. 17 press release here.

“This shows that perceived social class, as judged from a speaker’s accent, is an important predictor of U.K. listeners’ expectations about behavior, and this might have serious implications in the criminal justice system,” said Alice Paver of the University of Cambridge, the lead study author, in one of the press releases.

Frontiers in Communication published the study, conducted by the University of Cambridge in collaboration with Nottingham Trent University.

Courthouse News Service and the Guardian have coverage.

The researchers asked 180 English-speaking people throughout the United Kingdom to listen to recordings of 10 male voices with differing regional accents. The participants were then asked to rate the voices on social traits, such as “educated,” “rich,” “working class,” “trustworthy” and “friendly.”

They were also asked to rate the voices on 10 behaviors that included crimes: “return a lost wallet to its owner,” “stand up for someone who is being harassed,” “cheat on a romantic partner,” “lie on their CV,” “report a relative to the police for a minor offense,” “drive dangerously,” “physically assault someone,” “shoplift,” “touch someone sexually without consent” and “vandalize a shop front.”

The standard southern British English accent was rated highly for status traits, such as intelligent educated and rich. The Liverpool, London and Newcastle accents were most associated with working class, followed by the Bradford accent.

Liverpool, Newcastle and Bradford accents were associated with aggressive behavior, while the standard southern British English accent was deemed least aggressive.

There was a strong correlation between status traits and ethical behaviors, such as returning a lost wallet to its owner, and a slightly stronger association between status traits and the morally ambiguous behavior of reporting a relative to police for a minor offense.

But there was a negative correlation between status traits and criminal behaviors.

Speakers with the standard southern British English accent were deemed least likely to behave in criminal ways, with the exception of committing a sex offense. Non-English accents associated with the two cities of Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Glasgow, Scotland, were also thought to be less likely to engage in crime.

The London and Liverpool speakers, on other hand, were deemed most likely to engage in morally bad behaviors, while the Liverpool and Bradford speakers were rated most likely to engage in criminal behaviors.

“These findings emphasize the fact that people carry with them their stereotyped judgments about accents when making attributions of guilt and this has serious implications for the criminal justice system,” study authors wrote. “Prejudice in the criminal justice system can come from many factors, but unlike some types, for example racial prejudice, voice or accent-based prejudice is not currently something that jurors may be aware of or warned against letting it sway their decisions.”

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