Cognitive and Social Vulnerabilities: Adolescents’ Pragmatic Inferences of Leniency in Response to Minimization

The current study expands upon Luke and Alceste’s (2020) experiments to explore the effects of minimization via pragmatic implication on adolescents compared to adults in the context of police interrogations. Adolescent and adult participants read a police report and were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions (control, minimization, direct promise, and honesty) to gauge how differing perceived implications of leniency in interrogation tactics impact one’s perceptions of suspect outcomes. Drawing on empirical research on the social and cognitive vulnerabilities of minors (e.g., Bettens & Normile, 2023; Kassin & McNall, 1991; Kostelnik et al., 2006), I hypothesized that adolescents would be more likely to pragmatically infer leniency than adults. The results demonstrated that adolescents had higher expectations of leniency both in cases where the suspect confessed or denied their involvement, as well as lower perceived severity of the crime compared to adults. Regardless of age, participants who were presented with direct promise and honesty theme conditions endorsed more conditional leniency inferences than those in the moral minimization and control conditions. These results demonstrate that adolescents are not only vulnerable to inferring leniency via pragmatic implication, but also particularly susceptible to inferring direct promises from honesty-themed rhetoric.