ATLANTA — While visiting family in Florida over one spring break, Kat Albrecht, an assistant professor in Georgia State University’s Criminal Justice and Criminology Department, learned that some residents were resorting to an extreme measure — killing iguanas — to control what they perceived as an invasive-species threat. The discovery sparked her curiosity about how fear influences regulation and law.
Kat Albrecht Assistant Professor Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology Kat Albrecht is a legally trained computational social scientist who studies how complex data can inform policy, with particular emphasis on the nexus of fear, criminal data and the law.
“My early work studied how public perception of animals, such as snakes versus cats, shaped invasive-species policies,” she said. “It revealed a critical pattern: that fear often drives legal decisions, even when the perceived threat is exaggerated or unfounded.”
This realization led Albrecht to broader investigation into how fear, especially when amplified by media and politics, becomes embedded in legal systems with long-lasting consequences.
That question is the foundation for “Fear the Law: Codifying Fear Through the Objectification of the Law,” an article recently published in the University of California, Los Angeles’ Criminal Justice Law Review. The study was co-authored with Andrew Burns, a research associate at Louisiana State University, and Sierra Bell, a doctoral student in Georgia State’s Criminal Justice and Criminology Department. In the article, they analyze various domains of law using experimental digital surveys and detailed case study analysis to explore how fear becomes law and policy. They explain how overidentification with one dimension of an object leads to a process called “objectification.” Through objectification, a threat — whether real or imagined — induces fear, prompting regulatory intervention.
“We often think of laws as rational solutions, but sometimes the fear driving that regulation isn’t based on reality, or the law worsens the problem,” Albrecht said. “We then regulate fear through legislation, thinking we are solving the problem, but the actual problem might not even be real.”
For example, one of the five case studies the authors examine in the paper is the Juvenile Superpredator Myth, a now debunked theory and widespread fear in the 1990s that predicted a wave of violent crime by remorseless youth. Media reports and political rhetoric fueled public panic, leading nearly every U.S. state to pass laws making it easier to try minors as adults and impose harsher sentences. However, the predicted crime wave never materialized, as juvenile crime rates were already declining due to broader social and economic factors, including shifts in policing strategies and demographic changes. However, many laws enacted in response to the panic remain in place today.
Albrecht’s methodology for the study recreated emotionally charged scenarios in a lab setting to explore how fear responses impact risk perception. She and her coauthors presented participants with two versions of the same scenario, one with emotionally charged language, like “the hairs on Jenna’s arms stood up” and one without. By comparing participants’ assessments of danger in each version, she measured how subtle language changes influence perceptions of fear and risk.
“Fear in society operates differently than in controlled laboratory settings. We designed our study to better capture how fear spreads and influences decision-making in real-world conditions,” Albrecht said.
From there, they positioned their work as a starting point for further research on fear’s role in legal systems, calling for deeper theoretical exploration and improved empirical methods to measure the objectification of fear.
This work is only the beginning for Albrecht’s Fear and Computational Law Lab where Georgia State students work on a variety of projects to measure fear and how fear becomes ingrained in United States criminal law.
— By AYSPS Graduate Student Assistant Ayomidotun Olugbenle (M.A. in Communication)
Georgia State University Criminologist Examines Role of Fear in Crafting Law
