Ethnicity of Defendants and Jurors as Influences on Jury Decisions1

To assess the influence of ethnicity on jury decisions, 480 subjects viewed a videotaped trial of an Anglo or Hispanic defendant. Anglo or Hispanic majority 6-person juries deliberated until a unanimous verdict was reached. The juries that convicted the defendant were asked to determine sentence length and to provide a probation/ parole recommendation. Anglo majority juries convicted the defendant significantly more (M= 79%) than did the Hispanic majority juries (M= 52%), x²= 5.45, p < 0.02. No main effect of defendant ethnicity was obtained, but there was an interaction between the defendant and the jury's ethnicity, x²= 5.41, p < 0.02. Anglo majority juries were more lenient with the Anglo defendant, but the Hispanic majority juries did not differ in their conviction rates. No significant effects were obtained for sentence length. Differences in probation/parole recommendations were a function of jury ethnicity, F(l, 15) = 4.74, p < 0.05. Anglos were more likely to recommend that the defendant serve the full term of the sentence. These results are interpreted in terms of stereotyping and are discussed regarding their implications for a defendant's constitutional right to a fair trial.     

The influence of decision task and deliberation style on the verdict of the juries

The influence of decision task and deliberation style on the verdict of the juries. In the Kameda's Deliberation Style Model the emission of verdicts of responsibility when the deliberation style of the juries (elemental/compound) and the type of decision task (disjunctive/conjunctive) are jointly manipulated, is favoured in certain conditions. Given the consequences that these approaches could have in real judicial processes, this model is analyzed using a manslaughter crime under the Spanish judicial context conditions (nine members juries and seven or five members majorities emitting a verdict of guilty or not guilty, respectively). The obtained results indicated a better operation of the model when a conjunctive decision task was demanded.     

Explaining Jury Verdicts: Is Leniency Bias for Real?

Laboratory research suggests juries that begin deliberation with a strong majority (i.e., 2/3 or more) usually end up choosing the verdict favored by this majority, whereas those without a strong majority generally acquit or hang. We tested the robustness of these findings in the field by examining trial and deliberation correlates of jury verdicts using data from 79 criminal jury trials held in Indiana. As expected, several trial characteristics and the first-vote preference distribution were related to jury verdicts. However, there was no evidence of leniency bias—75% of those juries without a 2/3 majority on the first deliberation vote ended up convicting. Contributions of the study, limitations, and alternative explanations for the observed severity bias are discussed.     

Interactions Between Jurors as a Function of Majority vs. Unanimity Decision Rules

Ruling on the constitutionality of less than unanimous juries, the majority and dissenting Justices of the Supreme Court offered differing theories of social influence processes in jury deliberations. Some areas of disagreement involved verdict distribution, majority-minority interactions, and community confidence as a function of unanimity vs. non-unanimity requirements. The present series of three studies concentrated on these issues. In the first two studies, groups that were split 4:2 in initial vote deliberated a case involving first degree murder. In the third study, individuals served as jurors in each of seven mock trials (both civil and criminal). Half of these groups were required to deliberate to unanimity, the other half being required to deliberate to 2/3 majority. Results indicated that verdicts were not appreciably altered as a result of unanimity vs. non-unanimity requirements. However, unanimity groups were more likely to reach full consensus; their deliberations were characterized by more "conflict"; more opinions were changed as a result of the deliberation process; they reported more confidence in the verdict and tended to feel that justice had been administered. The findings tend to corroborate the influence theories of the dissenting Justices.     

The promise of a cognitive perspective on jury deliberation

Despite much psychological research regarding jury decision making, surprisingly little is known about the deliberation process that gives rise to jury verdicts. We review classic jury decision-making research regarding the importance of deliberation and more recent research, investigating deliberation and hung juries, that challenges the view that deliberation does not have an important impact on verdicts. We advocate greater attention to potential cognitive processes during deliberation that might explain the transition between predeliberation preferences and a jury’s ultimate verdict. We then review cognitive work in the group context generally, and the jury context specifically, illustrating the promise of a cognitive perspective on jury deliberation. Finally, we identify cognitive phenomena likely to be particularly valuable in illuminating deliberation behavior.     

Attractive but guilty: deliberation and the physical attractiveness bias

The current study examined the effect of jury deliberation on the tendency for mock jurors to find attractive defendants guilty less often. It was expected that there would be an interaction between group deliberation (yes or no) and defendant's appearance (plain-looking or attractive). It was hypothesized that mock jurors who did not deliberate would be more likely to find a plain-looking defendant guilty and that deliberation would mitigate this effect. The study was a 2 x 2 between-subjects factorial design. Participants were assigned randomly to one of four conditions: attractive defendant/deliberation, attractive defendant/no deliberation, plain-looking defendant/deliberation, and plain-looking defendant/no deliberation. A total of 172 undergraduates from a small, rural college in Vermont contributed to this study: mock jurors were 70 men and 52 women, ages ranged from 18 to 52 years (M=20.5, SD=4.9). The hypothesis was supported. Mock jurors who did not deliberate were more likely to find the plain-looking defendant guilty, whereas mock jurors who deliberated were more likely to find the attractive defendant guilty.     

Gender effects on individual verdicts and on mock jury verdicts in a Simulated Acquaintance Rape Trial

Since more women than men college students vote guilty in a simulated acquaintance rape trial [e.g., G. J. Fischer (1991) “Cognitive predictors of not-guilty verdicts in a Simulated Acquaintance Rape Trial,”Psychological Reports, Vol. 68, pp. 1199–1206], guilty mock jury verdicts were expected to increase as a function of the number of women on the jury (i.e., 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12). However, guilty verdicts did not increase significantly until either females were an overwhelming majority (i.e., 10 women to 2 men) or the jury was all female. Even in the latter conditions, guilty verdicts were fewer than would be expected based on the 86% of women and 66% of men voting guilty on a survey completed after reading about the trial, but before serving on a jury. Although a very large majority of females were needed to increase guilty verdicts, a majority appeared to lessen the likelihood of not guilty verdicts. For example, when a majority of jurors were female, 0/18 hung juries leaned toward a not guilty verdict vs. 11/34 juries leaning toward a not guilty verdict when less than or equal to one half of the jurors were female. Most of the students were White (85%), with 4% Asian, 3.2% Black, 3.2% Hispanic, and 4% “Other.”     

An investigation of persuasion and sentencing severity with mock juries

The extent to which the personal characteristics of individual mock jurors affect participation and influence with other jurors within the deliberation process was the focus of this investigation. A predeliberation locus of control measure, along with two conditions of jury composition (heterogenous vs homogenous with respect to the locus of control measure) were used to investigate interactions among sentencing severity, persuasiveness in deliberation, and demographic characteristics among 96 jurors. Results indicated that group sentences were significantly more severe than predeliberation sentences and that postdeliberation shifts were significantly more pronounced for the heterogenous juries than for the homogeneous juries.     

Pretrial Publicity, the Timing of the Trial, and Mock Jurors' Decision Processes

Pretrial publicity and a temporal interval between the news and trial were explored for their effects upon the jury's deliberation process and verdict. Publicity (neutral, negative) and trial timing (immediate, delayed) were manipulated in a 2 × 2 design. Twenty 12-person simulated juries were exposed either to neutral or negative publicity and viewed a videotaped criminal trial immediately following news exposure or after a one-week delay between news and trial. Dichotomous pre-and postdeliberation verdicts, probability of guilt scales, trial recall, ratings of companion jurors, perceptions of attorneys, assessments of the news article, and recall of news facts were measured. Deliberations were tape recorded and content analyzed. Juries exposed to neutral and negative publicity did not significantly differ on conviction rate, deliberation length, or on quality of deliberations. Prejudicial news elicited counter remarks about the threatening nature of the publicity to the defendant's right to a fair trial. Individual juror data revealed that while the news manipulation did not significantly affect predeliberation verdicts or attention to trial events, negative news lowered jurors' probability estimates of guilt and facilitated their recall of news facts. A discriminant analysis predicting jury verdict indicated a lack of support for prior research showing damaging effects from prejudicial pretrial publicity. Findings are explored for methodological implications and for usefulness of theoretical notions of reactance, and "sleeper effects".     

"Recipe for a Jury" Revisited: A Balance Theory Prediction

This study examined the relationship of three variables to verdict confidence in an experimental simulation of the jury deliberation process. The three variables were: sex of juror, verdict (guilty or innocent), and the similarity or dissimilarity between juror and confederate verdicts (congruence or incongruence). The subjects were 35 male and 37 female college students. They deliberated in groups containing a male confederate who role-played an obnoxious anti-White or anti-Black juror. Results indicated that before deliberation, male and guilt verdict jurors were more confident than females and innocent verdict jurors. After deliberation, however, sex differences in verdict confidence were absent while innocent verdicts jurors were more confident than guilt verdict jurors. Most important, as predicted from Heider's Balance Theory, males who deliberated with a confederate whose verdict was congruent with theirs' became less confident in their verdicts. Unexpectedly, females became more confident. The study's major hypothesis, then, that it may be advantageous for the defense to accept a juror who zealously advocates a guilty verdict, was only supported for males.     

The Impact of the Guilty but Mentally III Verdict on Juror Decisions: An Empirical Analysis

The present study attempted to determine the impact of alternative verdict choices on the decisions of mock jurors. Subjects used in this study as mock jurors were all college undergraduates. They were shown one of two versions of a videotaped simulated murder trial. Both films presented a defendant who appeared to be suffering emotional difficulties, but in one film the defendant had clearly committed the act while in the other film the defendant's actions were less certain. Subjects than gave their individual verdicts and, after deliberation with other subjects, a total jury verdict. The verdicts available to the subjects varied across three conditions such that the subjects in one condition were only allowed to find the defendant to be innocent or guilty. In another condition the subjects could find the defendant innocent, guilty or not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI). In the third condition the subjects were allowed to choose between innocent, guilty, NGRI, and guilty but mentally ill (GBMI). The results indicated that the addition of the "mental health" verdicts had a significant impact on the decisions of the jurors. In particular, it appears that only defendants who would otherwise have been found innocent were likely to be found NGRI. This study also indicated that the GBMI verdict is very attractive to mock jurors. Indeed, even innocent defendants were found to be GBMI, a form of guilt, when this alternative was made available. These findings raise potentially important constitutional and practical issues for the trial of emotionally disturbed criminal defendants.     

The Impact of Defendant Gender and Relationship to Victim on Juror Decisions in a Child Sexual Abuse Case

We examined the impact of defendant gender and relationship to victim on verdict decisions and ratings of witness believability in a case of alleged child sexual assault. Mock jurors ( N  = 256) read 1 of 4 extensive case summaries. The cases varied the gender of the defendant and his or her relationship to the child (parent or stranger). Data revealed that participants were significantly more likely to find male defendants (especially the father) guilty than female defendants. Female jurors rated the victim as more believable and the defendant as less believable than did male jurors. All mock jurors rated the victim as more believable if the defendant was male, and they saw the female defendants as more believable than the male defendants.     

The phenomenology of minority–majority status: Effects on innovation in argument generation

In three experiments, we manipulated participants' perceived numerical status and compared the originality and creativity of arguments generated by members of numerical minorities and majorities. Independent judges, blind to experimental conditions, rated participants' written arguments. In Studies 1 and 2, we found that participants assigned to a numerical minority generated more original arguments when advocating their own position than did numerical majorities. In Study 3, an equal‐factions control group was included in the design, and all participants were instructed to argue for a counter‐attitudinal position. Those in the numerical minority generated more creative arguments than those in both the majority and equal‐factions conditions, but not stronger arguments. We propose cognitive and social processes that may underlie our obtained effects and discuss implications for minority influence research. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ethnic Minority‐Majority Asymmetry in National Attitudes around the World: A Multilevel Analysis

Using data from the International Social Survey Programme, this research investigated asymmetric attitudes of ethnic minorities and majorities towards their country and explored the impact of human development, ethnic diversity, and social inequality as country‐level moderators of national attitudes. In line with the general hypothesis of ethnic asymmetry, we found that ethnic, linguistic, and religious majorities were more identified with the nation and more strongly endorsed nationalist ideology than minorities (H1, 33 countries). Multilevel analyses revealed that this pattern of asymmetry was moderated by country‐level characteristics: the difference between minorities and majorities was greatest in ethnically diverse countries and in egalitarian, low inequality contexts. We also observed a larger positive correlation between ethnic subgroup identification and both national identification and nationalism for majorities than for minorities (H2, 20 countries). A stronger overall relationship between ethnic and national identification was observed in countries with a low level of human development. The greatest minority‐majority differences in the relationship between ethnic identification and national attitudes were found in egalitarian countries with a strong welfare state tradition.     

Does jury deliberation really improve jurors' memories?

The courts assume that jury deliberation corrects errors in jurors' memories, so that the verdict is based on accurate memory for the trial. We evaluated the validity of this assumption by examining jurors' memories and verdicts both before and after deliberation. Unlike previous studies, we tracked how event memories changed as a function of how they were discussed in deliberation. Overall, deliberation resulted in only a slight memory improvement. Deliberation corrected errors and did not introduce distortions. Reasons for such slight memory improvement are that jurors did not think they had memory gaps and thus did not use the deliberation process to improve their memory, and jurors who controlled deliberation were not always the most accurate in their memories. Finally, those most likely to change their verdict as a result of deliberation were not those who had the least accurate memories, but rather those who had the least confidence in their memories. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Internalization versus compliance: Differential processes underlying minority influence and conformity

Two experiments investigated whether minority influence and conformity operate by the same or by different processes. It was predicted that subjects who were simultaneously exposed to a majority and a minority opinion would move towards the minority in private but towards the majority in public. The results of Experiment 1 supported this hypothesis. Experiment 2 investigated three hypotheses predicting that (1) the above interaction would be replicated, (2) minorities would trigger more arguments and counter-arguments, and (3) cognitive activity would mediate internalization but not compliance. Hypotheses 1 and 3 were supported. The second hypothesis was not supported. However, minorities were found to trigger more arguments and fewer counter-arguments than majorities. The results were interpreted as supporting the dual process model.     

The Effects of Delayed Report and Motive for Reporting on Perceptions of Sexual Harassment

We examined whether the timing of the report and the victim's apparent motive for reporting influences women's and men's perceptions of sexual harassment. Undergraduates (153 women, 149 men) listened to 1 of 6 versions of audiotaped testimony of the victim and defendant. The report was filed either immediately or 18 months later, and motive either was presented as altruistic, retaliatory, or was not specified. Participants chose a verdict, rated the defendant's guilt, and rated the defendant and victim on several dimensions. Higher guilt ratings, more positive evaluations of the victim, and more negative evaluations of the defendant were associated with immediate reporting and an altruistic motive, although women weighed these factors more heavily than did men.     

Prejudiced attitude measurement using the Rasch Rating Scale model

There have been two basic approaches for the study of minority group prejudice against the majority: to adapt instruments from the majority group, and to use qualitative techniques by analyzing the content of the discourse of the groups involved. Neither of these procedures solves the problem of measuring intergroup attitudes of majorities and minorities in interaction. This study shows the result of a prejudice scale which was developed to measure the attitude of both the minority and majority groups. Prejudice is conceived as an attitude which requires the beliefs or opinions about the out-group, the emotions it elicits, and the behavior or intentional behavior toward it to be known for its evaluation. The innovation in this work is that the psychometric development of the scale was based on the item response theory, and more specifically, the rating scale model.     

How type of excuse defense, mock juror age, and defendant age affect mock jurors' decisions

The authors investigated the effects of mock juror age (younger vs. older), defendant age (22 vs. 65), and type of excuse defense used by defendants (a highly self-inflicted condition, Cocaine Dependency Disorder, vs. a less self-inflicted condition, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder) on mock juror decisions. Ninety-six younger and 96 older adults read a scenario and answered a questionnaire. Results indicated that the defendant using the highly self-inflicted excuse was more likely to receive a guilty verdict and a longer sentence than was the defendant using the less self-inflicted excuse. Older jurors were more certain of their verdicts and saw the defendant as more responsible for his condition than did younger jurors. Defendant age did not affect juror decisions. In addition, excuse type and juror age affected the jurors' perceptions of the victim's responsibility for the attack. The authors discuss the potential influence of juror age on perceptions of defendant responsibility.     

Mock Juror Attribution of Criminal Responsibility: Effects of Race and the Guilty But Mentally III (GBMI) Verdict Option1

The present study examined three questions relevant to the insanity defense: Does the availability of the alternative verdict “Guilty But Mentally III” affect juror assessment of criminal responsibility? Does race of defendant significantly affect juror decision-making about who should be acquitted under the insanity defense? And does race of victim significantly influence how jurors decide their final insanity defense verdicts? Race of defendant (black or white), race of victim (black or white), and verdict choice set [(Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity (NGRI), Guilty, and Not Guilty) vs. (Guilty but Mentally III (GBMI), NGRI, Guilty, and Not Guilty)] were systematically varied. The mock-trial was presented to 197 college student subjects by means of an audiotape and slide show. Following the re-enacted trial, subjects answered a series of questions regarding the case. The main dependent variable was the rendered verdict. Both χ²loglinear analyses revealed a significant relationship between race of defendant and verdict such that the defendant, when presented as black, was acquitted NGRI significantly more often than when the defendant was presented as white. No significant effects were found for race of victim. The availability of the GBMI verdict option resulted in a twofold effect: There was a two-thirds reduction in both NGRI and straight guilty verdicts when the GBMI verdict option was made available. The implications for legal policy and future research are discussed.