Juror Personality on Sexual Assault Verdicts Utilizing the Big Five Model

Abstract

The prevalence of sexual assault and the low number of sexual assault convictions makes it imperative to research such judicial matters. The key element or constant in each trial would be the jury. The jury decides whether or not to convict the defendant. In order to increase the rightful convictions, a study on jurors was done; specifically a study on juror personality. By reviewing previous studies done on juror personality, there appears to be a connection between juror personality and bias toward sexual assault (Clark et al., 2007). To study this, a survey was sent out to willing participants who are eligible to be jurors. The survey included a personality test portion and a sexual assault prompt portion. The personality test portion included questions pertaining to the Agreeableness facet and the sexual assault case prompts made the participants vote guilty or not guilty for the defendant charged. The results showed that there was no correlation between the specific Agreeableness facet and bias toward sexual assault; however, there was evidence showing that the 31-40 Agreeableness score range (from 10-50), yielded the highest bias against the defendant. The implications of this study have applications in various legal fields to convict sexual assaulters to a higher extent.