Abstract
Jury deliberations provide a quintessential example of collective decision-making, but few studies have probed the available data to explore how juries reach verdicts. We examine how features of jury dynamics can be better understood from the joint distribution of final votes and deliberation time. To do this, we fit several different decision-making models to jury datasets from different places and times. In our best-fit model, jurors influence each other and have an increasing tendency to stick to their opinion of the defendant’s guilt or innocence. We also show that this model can explain spikes in mean deliberation times when juries are hung, sub-linear scaling between mean deliberation times and trial duration, and unexpected final vote and deliberation time distributions. Our findings suggest that both stubbornness and herding play an important role in collective decision-making, providing a nuanced insight into how juries reach verdicts, and more generally, how group decisions emerge.
Highlights
What mechanisms underlie collective decision-making? Recent research on collective decision making has compared statistical patterns in empirical data to models [1,2,3,4,5] and tested how opinions change in controlled experimental settings [6,7,8,9,10]
Both methods have provided substantial insight into the dynamics of collective decisions, the mechanism underlying how groups make decisions that do not end in unanimous agreement is underexplored
We ask whether clues in data can hint at the role influence might play in group decision-making
Summary
Recent research on collective decision making has compared statistical patterns in empirical data to models [1,2,3,4,5] and tested how opinions change in controlled experimental settings [6,7,8,9,10]. Both methods have provided substantial insight into the dynamics of collective decisions, the mechanism underlying how groups make decisions that do not end in unanimous agreement is underexplored. Do related models for other datasets reach similar conclusions? We explore
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