Contrast effect on the perception of the severity of a criminal offence

All the participants (undergraduate students) were exposed sequentially (one by one) to 5 brief descriptions of different actions constituting criminal offences according to the Spanish Penal Code. Each description was accompanied by the specific name of the offence, and the range of the jail sentence length (in months) that might be imposed for the offence according to this penal code. The participants were asked to choose within this range a...