Juror Selection: A Comparison of Two Methods In Several Criminal Cases1

Ethical and constitutional issues have been raised by critics concerning the intervention of social science methods in the voir dire, pretrial, screening of prospective jurors. An experiment was conducted to compare the effectiveness of conventional jury selection methods utilized by attorneys (past experience, intuition, folklore) vs. systematic social science methods (systematic identification of predictive relationships among personality, demographic, and attitudinal variables). The comparison was made over four separate criminal cases. The data indicated that in cases in which the predictive relationships used by the systematic social science methods were relatively strong, this method is superior to the conventional method in predicting favorable jurors' responses. The more intuitive conventional niethod was superior when the critical predictive relationships were weak or absent. Overall, the systematic social science method was not superior to the conventional method. Issues of ecological validity and pretrial discovery rules were discussed.