Recall the Death Penalty Quiz that you took. You were grouped with others, based on your intended actions as actors in executions. So were people in the Death Penalty Study. The bar chart shows the level of agreement in an index that is the average (mean) of the 7 opinions that make up the pro-death penalty belief system.*

Even among those who disapprove of all 11 methods of execution named in the study (Abolitionists), 18% generally agreed with pro-death penalty beliefs. However, their agreement is much lower than Soft Abstract Supporters and Hard Abstract Supporters of the death penalty. And both groups of abstract supporters were significantly lower in their agreement with these beliefs than Executioners. For a technical explanation of the statistical tests, click here.

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*Everyone in the study was given a "score" on these 7 opinions. For each opinion, a person could strongly disagree (1), somewhat disagree (2), neither agree/disagree (3), somewhat agree (4), or strongly agree (5). If, on average, a person's score was in the "agree" range (greater than 3.0), that person was classified as "agreeing" with the pro-death penalty belief system.

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