Emotional Truth: Emotional Accuracy: Adam Morton

It is accuracy rather than truth itself that is valuable. Emotional truth is a dubious though attractive notion, but emotional accuracy is much easier to make sense of. My approach to accuracy goes via an account of what makes a story accurate. Stories can be accurate but not true, and emotions can be accurate whether or not they are true. The capacity for emotional accuracy, for emotions that fit a person's situation, is an aspect of emotional intelligence, which is as important an aspect of rational human agency as the intelligent formation of beliefs and desires.     

What are we studying? Student jurors,community jurors,and construct validity

Jury researchers have long been concerned about the generalizability of results from experiments that utilize undergraduate students as mock jurors. The current experiment examined the differences between 120 students (55 males and 65 females, mean age = 20 years) and 99 community members (49 males and 50 females, mean age = 42 years) in culpability evaluations for homicide and sexual assault cases. Explicit attitude measures served as indicators of bias for sexual assault, defendant, and homicide adjudication. Results revealed that student and community participants showed different biases on these general explicit attitude measures and these differences manifested in judgments of culpability (guilt likelihood, convincingness of state's arguments, convincingness of defendant's arguments, and the defendants' criminal intentions) in sexual assault and homicide case scenarios. The results also showed that student mock jurors were more lenient when assigning guilt in homicide cases than were community members. The implications for future mock jury research are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.