Religion, Attribution Style, and Punitiveness Toward Juvenile Offenders*

A growing body of research shows that adherents to conservative Christian beliefs are more punitive than others in their response to crime. A frequently offered but still untested explanation is that such beliefs promote a dispositional attribution style—the idea that crime results from the offender's character, not from unfortunate or unjust environmental influences. With punitiveness toward juvenile offenders as the dependent variable, the present study directly tests the hypothesis that a tendency to attribute crime to dispositional factors is the intervening variable linking conservative religious beliefs to punitiveness. The analysis provides strong support for the hypothesis.