Race,Rape, and Bias: Distortion of Prior Odds and Meaning Changes

Two experiments were conducted to investigate how racial bias affects juror decision making. Three sources of bias were studied: (1) prior probabilities of guilt, (2) distortion of the meaning of evidence, and (3) differential weighting of information. A paired comparison technique employed in the first study revealed that pretrial probabilities of guilt were greater when the victim was White than when she was Black. In the second experiment, a different group of subjects viewed one of four videotaped simulated rape trials in which seven segments of testimony had been previously rated as pro-prosecution, pro-defense, or neutral. During the trial, subjects rated each segment on three different scales: prosecution, defense, and degree of defendant guilt. Results indicated that neutral evidence was seen as more favorable to prosecution for a White victim compared to a Black victim. Evidence which favored either prosecution or defense was not distorted. Regression analyses revealed a positive relationship between estimates of guilt and distortion of evidence. The weight or importance of the evidence did not vary as a function of victim or defendant race. Years of recommended imprisonment indicated greater severity toward the Black assailant of a White woman. The results suggest that bias in favor of White victims occurs both in the assessment of pretrial probabilities and perception of evidence.     

The Direct and Indirect Effects of Inadmissible Evidence1

College students (N= 270) assigned to six-person mock juries read summaries of a murder trial and then evaluated the defendant's guilt both before and after group discussion. The strength of the prosecution's case was manipulated, as was the inclusion of extra wiretapping evidence that favored the prosecution or the defense and was ruled admissible or inadmissible by the judge. Whether it favored the prosecution or the defense, inadmissible evidence directly biased subjects' reactions toward the defendant and indirectly biased their behaviors during the group discussions. None of these effects varied with the strength of the prosecution's case. The results also showed that the direct effects of inadmissible evidence were at least partially mediated by its indirect effects, suggesting that the process of deliberation can potentially help jurors to control the influence of inadmissible evidence on their decisions.     

Evaluating arguments during instigations of defence motivation and accuracy motivation

When people evaluate the strength of an argument, their motivations are likely to influence the evaluation. However, few studies have specifically investigated the influences of motivational factors on argument evaluation. This study examined the effects of defence and accuracy motivations on argument evaluation. According to the compatibility between the advocated positions of arguments and participants' prior beliefs and the objective strength of arguments, participants evaluated four types of arguments: compatible‐strong, compatible‐weak, incompatible‐strong, and incompatible‐weak arguments. Experiment 1 revealed that participants possessing a high defence motivation rated compatible‐weak arguments as stronger and incompatible‐strong ones as weaker than participants possessing a low defence motivation. However, the strength ratings between the high and low defence groups regarding both compatible‐strong and incompatible‐weak arguments were similar. Experiment 2 revealed that when participants possessed a high accuracy motivation, they rated compatible‐weak arguments as weaker and incompatible‐strong ones as stronger than when they possessed a low accuracy motivation. However, participants' ratings on both compatible‐strong and incompatible‐weak arguments were similar when comparing high and low accuracy conditions. The results suggest that defence and accuracy motivations are two major motives influencing argument evaluation. However, they primarily influence the evaluation results for compatible‐weak and incompatible‐strong arguments, but not for compatible‐strong and incompatible‐weak arguments.     

Race and information processing in criminal trials: does the defendant's race affect how the facts are evaluated?

Two studies examined whether a criminal defendant's race influences Whites' sensitivity to legally relevant information. In Study 1, prosecution case strength ratings and guilt likelihood ratings were more sensitive to the strength of the defendant's alibi when he was Black than when he was White, if the experimental task was designed to elicit low processing motivation. Under high motivation, participants were equally sensitive to alibi strength, regardless of defendant race. In Study 2, the alibi strength manipulation was replaced with a manipulation of the effectiveness of the district attorney's cross-examination. As predicted, defense case strength ratings were more sensitive to the strength of the prosecutor's cross-examination with a Black defendant than with a White defendant-under low motivation. Under high motivation, sensitivity did not depend on defendant race. These results suggest that a Black defendant can elicit greater sensitivity to legally relevant information than will a White defendant.     

Alibi Believability: The Effect of Prior Convictions and Judicial Instructions

Undergraduates (N = 339) listened to a simulated police interview with a defendant concerning his alibi. We studied the impact of (a) the strength of the alibi evidence; (b) defendant's prior convictions; (c) judge's instructions on prior conviction evidence; and (d) perceivers' need for cognition (NFC) on alibi believability and defendant guilt ratings. Defendants previously convicted of the same crime as the current charge were seen as more likely to be guilty than defendants previously convicted of a different crime. Judge's instructions did not affect guilt ratings. NFC was less influential than anticipated, but did affect participants' understanding and recall of judicial instructions. Strong alibis were seen as more believable and led to lower guilt ratings than weak alibis.     

The Backbone of Closing Speeches: The Impact of Prosecution Versus Defense Language on Judicial Attributions1

Subtle attribution cues embedded in language were investigated in a simulated courtroom setting. Lawyers in training as well as lay attorneys gave closing speeches for the defense and for the prosecution. In a first study, distinct linguistic strategies were identified. Prosecutors attributed internal causality to defendants, whereas defense attorneys supported negative intentional attributions to the victim. In a second study, lay persons judged the closing speeches and decided on verdict and punishment. Severity of punishment depended on speaker's role (defense or prosecution), severity of crime, and 2 linguistic strategies, indicating intentionality of negative behavior and dispositionality of negative behavior. It is concluded that subtle language strategies do have a noticeable effect on the attribution of blame and guilt in a legal setting.     

The Relation of Cognitive and Memorial Processes to Persuasion in a Simulated Jury Trial

Four experiments investigated the dependence of persuasion on cognitive factors. All experiments employed a court case for which 795 subjects acted as jury members, reading summaries of both the prosecution and defense's testimony. The amount of objective information on both sides of the case was varied. Persuasion was a position function of the number of prosecution arguments and the number of defense arguments. This finding was extended by obtaining measures of the subjects'cognitive reactions to the case as well as their opinions and by following both of these measures over time. Both analysis of variance and multiple regression techniques showed that subjects could have derived their opinions from their cognitions about the case. This relationship also held up over time. These results suggest the general form of an information-processing theory of persuasion. One prediction of this theory is for an asymptotic function relating objective information to persuasion. This prediction received empirical support.     

The effect of accent evaluation and evidence on a suspect's perceived guilt and criminality

The authors investigated the effect of accent evaluation, evidence, and crime type on participants' perceptions of guilt and criminality. British student raters (n = 199) listened to a tape-recorded exchange between a male criminal suspect and a male policeman. The authors manipulated this exchange to produce a 2 (accent type: English regional or standard) x 2 (evidence type: strong or weak) x 2 (crime type: blue collar or white collar) factorial design. Dependent measures consisted of participants' ratings of the suspect's guilt and criminality. Contrary to previous research, accent did not significantly influence attributions of guilt either as a main effect or in interaction with the contextual variables. However, independent of evidence presented and crime type, the regional-accented suspect was evaluated as more typically criminal and more likely to be reaccused of a crime than the standard-accented suspect.     

Expressed Emotions and Perceived Credibility of Child Mock Victims Disclosing Physical Abuse

The influence of emotions displayed by child witnesses during disclosure of abuse on judgments of credibility and guilt were examined. Eight mock police interviews with child actors, telling a story of physical abuse with different emotional expressions, were video‐recorded. In a between‐group design, jury eligible lay persons (n = 162) and professional child protective service (CPS) workers (n = 154) rated the credibility of the child witnesses and the probability that the alleged perpetrator was guilty of crime. The emotions displayed by the child witnesses strongly affected judgments of credibility and guilt. The patterns of ratings were closely similar in the two participant samples, but the overall ratings of the CPS workers were higher than those of the lay participants. Judgments of the probability of guilt followed a similar pattern with a correlation of .68 between the two variables. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are briefly discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Negative and positive pretrial publicity affect juror memory and decision making

The experiment examined the effects of exposure to pretrial publicity (PTP) and delay on juror memory and decision-making. Mock jurors read news articles containing negative PTP, positive PTP, or unrelated articles. Five days later, they viewed a videotaped murder trial, after which they made decisions about guilt. Finally, all participants independently attributed specific information as having been presented during the trial or in the news articles. Half of the jurors rendered their verdicts and completed the source-memory test immediately after the trial, while the other half did so after a 2-day delay. Exposure to PTP significantly affected guilty verdicts, perceptions of defendant credibility, juror ratings of the prosecuting and defense attorneys, and misattributions of PTP as having been presented as trial evidence. Similar effects were obtained for negative and positive PTP. Delay significantly increased source-memory errors but did not influence guilt ratings. Defendant's credibility and juror ratings of prosecuting and defense attorneys significantly mediated the effect of PTP on guilt ratings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).     

Psychological differentiation and the evaluation of juridic information: Cognitive and affective consequences

The cognitive and evaluative involvements of field dependence-independence in the processing of available information were examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, ninety-six female undergraduates were assigned to field-dependent and field-independent conditions (via a median split on Embedded Figures Test scores). Half were given information about the trial of a man accused of attempted manslaughter that was suggestive of guilt; the other half received information suggestive of innocence. They were asked to indicate their confidence in the guilt or innocence of the defendant, and to recall arguments from the information they received. Field-dependent subjects were significantly more extreme in their confidence judgments, particularly in the exonerating conditions. They also showed nonsignificantly poorer recall. In Experiment 2, forty-eight subjects from Experiment 1 were given arguments biased in the opposite direction of their original sets. Field-dependent subjects were significantly more likely to shift their confidence judgments and report discomfort when the new information suggested innocence, and to underrecall new information when it suggested guilt. Field-dependent subjects again showed poorer recall. The results of both experiments were discussed in terms of their support for a field-dependence value bias and encoding deficiency.     

The Impact of Negative Campaign Ads

We compared negative and positive ads in the context of a fictitious election. Participants read a strong or weak message supporting one candidate (positive ad) or derogating the opposition candidate (negative ad). The strong positive message had a greater impact on attitudes toward the candidates than the weak positive message, but message strength had no significant effect for negative messages, suggesting that positive messages are centrally processed, and negative messages serve mainly as peripheral cues. Accordingly, a strong positive message was more effective than a weak positive message, but a weak positive message was less effective than a weak negative message. We conclude that negative political ads are advisable only when candidates cannot provide strong arguments to support their candidacy.     

Degree of Detail of Eyewitness Testimony and Mock Juror Judgments1

The influence of the degree of detail of eyewitness testimony on two sides of a court case was investigated in two experiments. In the first experiment subject-jurors read a civil court case involving an automobile-pedestrian accident. The plaintiff and the defendant presented conflicting eyewitness accounts. Judgments of the relative credibility of the eyewitnesses on each side and the percentage of negligence of the parties were influenced by the relative degree of detail of the eyewitness testimony on each side. In the second experiment subject-jurors read a criminal court case involving robbery and murder. The prosecution and defense presented conflicting eyewitness accounts. The degree of detail of the prosecution eyewitness testimony influenced judgments of guilt and judgments of the credibility of the eyewitnesses. An examination of the reasons for verdicts and credibility judgments revealed that some subjects inferred that an eyewitness who gave testimony with a greater degree of detail had a better memory for the trivial details and the culprit than an eyewitness who gave testimony with a lesser degree of detail. Implications of these results for the legal system are discussed.     

Effects of inadmissible Evidence on the Decisions of Simulated Jurors: A Moral Dilemma

In a 2 × 3 design, simulated jurors received either weak or strong evidence against a defendant in a murder case. Within each evidence condition, subjects were given either additional evidence ruled admissible, additional evidence ruled inadmissible, or no additional evidence. Results indicated that ( a ) jurors were biased by inadmissible evidcnce in the weak-evidence but not in the strong-evidence condition, ( b ) strong evidence resulted in more guilty verdicts than did weak evidence, ( c ) confidence in verdict was influenced by strength of evidence, and ( d ) confidence of guilt was positively correlated with severity of punishment. Implications of the results are discussed within the context of the judicial process.     

Judicial decision making: order of evidence presentation and availability of background information

An experiment was conducted to investigate both the effect of the order of presentation of defence and prosecution evidence and the prior availability of background information on assessment of guilt. Subjects were required to judge the defendant's probability of guilt either after each witness statement (step-by-step) or after having read all witness statements (end-of-sequence). In the step-by-step mode, an order effect was observed with later evidence exerting a greater impact on the subjects' judgment. This recency effect probably occurred because subjects used an anchoring-and-adjustment process: each new piece of evidence was averaged with an anchor judgment reflecting the overall assessment of previous items. In the end-of-sequence mode, on the other hand, the order effect depended on the background condition: if background information was provided a recency effect occurred, but if no background information was available a primacy effect was evident. This result might be explained by assuming that subjects tried to integrate witness information into a coherent cognitive pattern. As the judgment is memory-based in the end-of-sequence condition, recent information will be more available than earlier items. However, when no background information was presented, the first evidence items had to be processed at a more semantic, deeper level, resulting in a primacy effect that apparently outweighed the recency effect. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Examining the prevalence, role and impact of evidence regarding Antisocial Personality, sociopathy and psychopathy in capital cases: a survey of defense team members

Although anecdotal case accounts suggest that evidence concerning Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD), sociopathy and psychopathy is frequently introduced by the prosecution in capital murder trials, to date there has been no systematic research to determine the actual prevalence, role, or perceived impact of such evidence in these cases. Survey data collected from attendees at a national capital mitigation conference (n=41) indicated that prosecution evidence concerning APD was quite prevalent, with "sociopath" and "psychopath" labels being introduced less frequently. Evidence concerning these disorders, which were assessed primarily via DSM criteria and self-report personality inventories, was most often introduced by the prosecution in the sentencing phase to address a defendant's ostensible risk of future dangerousness and/or to rebut mitigating evidence-although it was also introduced frequently in the guilt/innocence phase of these trials to rebut mental health evidence offered by the defense. Survey respondents believed that evidence concerning APD, sociopathy, and psychopathy had a considerable impact on trial outcomes. Also, although defense objections were common, such evidence was rarely ruled to be inadmissible in these cases.     

The Timing of the Defense Opening Statement: Don't Wait Until the Evidence Is in1

Defense attorneys often reserve their opening statements until after presentation of evidence by the prosecution, a practice advocated by some experts. The current study, involving 291 subjects, varied the timing of the defense attorney's opening statement so that it preceded the prosecutor's opening statement, immediately followed the prosecutor's opening statement, or was reserved until after the prosecutor's case presentation. The type of opening statement (content vs. noncontent) and the testimony (altered vs. unaltered) were varied for purposes of increasing generalization. Materials were based on an actual case of auto theft and were presented in written form complete with judge's instructions. The results showed that subjects perceived eyewitness testimony, the prosecutor's opening statement, the prosecutor's closing statement, the defense attorney's closing statement, and the effectiveness of the attorneys differently depending on the timing of the opening statement. Each of these items favored the defense more than the prosecution if the defense opening statement was earlier rather than later. These effects did not interact with type of opening statement or the testimony alteration variable. Individual verdicts, when weighted by the subjects' confidence in their verdicts, were also affected by the timing variable with verdicts more favorable to the defense when the defense opening statement was given earlier rather than later. The consistency with which the timing variable affected subjects' impressions suggests that defense attorneys who take their first opportunity to make an opening statement, rather than delay, end up with a stronger case for their client. Possible exceptions to this conclusion are discussed.     

Weight as an Embodiment of Importance

ABSTRACT— Four studies show that the abstract concept of importance is grounded in bodily experiences of weight. Participants provided judgments of importance while they held either a heavy or a light clipboard. Holding a heavy clipboard increased judgments of monetary value (Study 1) and made participants consider fair decision-making procedures to be more important (Study 2). It also caused more elaborate thinking, as indicated by higher consistency between related judgments (Study 3) and by greater polarization of agreement ratings for strong versus weak arguments (Study 4). In line with an embodied perspective on cognition, these findings suggest that, much as weight makes people invest more physical effort in dealing with concrete objects, it also makes people invest more cognitive effort in dealing with abstract issues.