Simulated Jury Research Articles

An experimental investigation of procedural issues in complex tort trials.

An investigation of the impact of innovations in civil trial procedure manipulated trial structure (unitary vs. separated trial issues), order of decisions (liability or causation first), and number of decisions made (one to four) in a simulated toxic tort trial. Juries gave verdicts and damage awards. Recordings were made of the juries' deliberations. The results showed significantly more verdicts in favor of the plaintiffs in unitary trials (causation, liability, and damages heard together) as opposed to separated trials. However, average damage awards were higher in the separated than in the unitary trial conditions. Juries assigned more responsibility to the defendant in the unitary trial. Juries also used the totality of the evidence to decide all issues, especially general causation, which contained the most ambiguous testimony. The performance of these simulated juries in complex litigation was discussed in terms of group and individual cognitive factors.

Negligent Release Litigation: a Proposal for Procedural Reform

Much of what has been written lately regarding tort reform has dealt with substantive as opposed to procedural concerns. This paper offers a preliminary proposal regarding procedural reform that would potentially correct for the hindsight bias in negligent release litigation and have application in other torts contexts involving transferred responsibility. The proposal for bifurcated trial proceedings is worthy of consideration by legal scholars and policy makers as a potential mechanism for ensuring fairness and improving the quality of justice. As a footnote, it might be added that social scientists might contribute to the assessment of the proposed bifurcation procedure by conducting jury simulation studies that investigate the impact of bifurcated vs. non-bifurcated procedures as a function of strong vs. weak evidence of clinician negligence in mock negligent release cases.

Information competition and vividness effects in on-line judgments

The paper examines the antecedents and consequences of vividness effects in an extremely consequential arena of judgment—jury decisions. Lawyers and student subjects participated in a simulated jury trial. The trial featured a civil suit and allowed examination of the impact of communication vividness in situations of low and high information competition. The vivid information in this study was perceived by subjects as evoking images, being striking (unusual) in imagery, and memorable, but not more emotion-arousing or concrete. Subjects' judgments were significantly biased in favor of the disputant using vivid information presentation.

Cross‐examination of the expert witness: Do hostile tactics affect impressions of a simulated jury?

AbstractNinety‐one introductory psychology students viewed a videotape of a simulated personal damage trial in which a psychologist expert witness testified about a plaintiff's psychological problems resulting from trauma. The defense attorney's cross‐examination tactics, employed against the expert witness, were varied in the videotape. A 2 × 2 factorial design was used, with leading versus nonleading questions and a hostile versus nonhostile attorney. An interaction effect was obtained, in which a hostile attorney using leading questions and a nonhostile attorney using nonleading questions were perceived as least effective.

Laboratory simulation and bias in the study of juror behavior: A methodological note.

Theoretical speculation and meta-analysis suggest that the strength of treatment effects (e.g., defendant attractiveness) may become weaker as the experimental simulation becomes more realistic and complex. In order to test this hypothesis, various levels of biasing pretrial publicity were combined with both a short and a long trial. Results provided no support for the contention that treatment effects act differently as a function of the length of the stimulus trial in which they are embedded. Rather, it is suggested that treatments used in simplified jury simulations may often show similar effects when examined in more realistic, complex settingsif the treatments are comparable.

Impact of hypnotic testimony on the jury.

In the past decade, the forensic use of hypnosis to enhance the memories of victims, witnesses, and defendants has sharply increased. A great deal of controversy surrounds this issue. Some commentators argue that testimony derived from hypnosis should not be allowed as evidence because of its inherent unreliability and the unduly powerful impact it may have on a jury. In the present research, we used a jury simulation technique to study the impact that a hypnotically refreshed witness has upon jurors' decision making. A major finding is that jurors view hypnotic testimony with a certain amount of skepticism. In some respects, its impact is comparable to that of testimony based on delayed recall, and rarely does it have the impact of testimony from an immediate report. In addition, jurors' judgments about hypnotically refreshed testimony affected the way they evaluated other evidence at trial: Jurors who learned that a prosecution witness had been hypnotized were less believing ofother prosecution witnesses than were jurors not exposed to hypnotic testimony. The forensic application of these findings is discussed.

Juror decision making: The importance of evidence.

Much of the research on juror decision making is concerned with whether jurors are swayed by irrelevant-or extralegal-issues in their judgments of defendants. Such studies examine whether jurors' attitudes and victims' and defendants' characteristics have a measurable impact on these decisions. Yet, in the typical study, evidential issues are either poorly measured or ignored, hence the effects of extralegal issues may be exaggerated. Moreover, jury simulations are often chosen to study these questions despite critics' concerns about the generalizability of the results. The present study uses data gathered from actual jurors to assess whether the emphasis on juror competence is justified. The results indicate that these jurors' decisions are dominated by evidential issues, particularly evidence concerning the use of force and physical evidence. Jurors were considerably less responsive to characteristics of victims and defendants, although some of these factors significantly affected their decisions.

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”.

Jurors' interpretations and jury decision making.

In arriving at their verdicts, jurors must determine “what really happened” in the case at hand. Their interpretations then guide their decision making and become influential in the group deliberation process. This article uses conversational data from simulated jury deliberations to describe jurors' practice of articulating schematic interpretations as accounts for their verdict choices, and as means for persuading other jurors. As jurors contribute additional interpretations during deliberations, the group decision-making task becomes more complex, deliberations las longer, and they are more difficult to resolve. A significant negative relation is established between the number of interpretations articulated and the jury's likelihood of reaching a unanimous verdict. Articulating multiple interpretations in support of a candidate verdict appears to militate against its unanimous adoption.

Reducing the Biasing Effect of Perpetrator Attractiveness in Jury Simulation

Two studies showed that bias of jurors in favor of an attractive defendant was significantly reduced by increasing the factual material in the case. Our findings suggest that increasing the quantity and precision of relevant facts transfers the emphasis from judging the perpetrator to judging the crime.

Judgment and Treatment of People of Varied Attractiveness

The present study refers to the influence of attractiveness of ‘offenders’ (male and female) on judgment and treatment of them in a simulated jury task (120 subjects). Analysis shows that there is no influence of attractiveness provided offenders do not differ in other qualities. The different results of Efran (1974) and Sigall and Ostrove (1975) could be interpreted in terms of inequality of stimulus persons on dimensions other than attractiveness.

Structural effects in simulated jury decision making.

Structural effects in simulated jury decision making.

Structural effects in simulated jury decision making.

Structural effects in simulated jury decision making.

Person perception and jurors' decisions

In an experiment on simulated juries subjects were asked to record their impressions of the major participants in the trial. 134 subjects heard a taped reconstruction of a case of theft, based on the court transcript, 224 subjects heard a case of rape. Their impressions, recorded on an adjectival scale, were factor analysed. There was considerable stability in the factors that emerged across trials and across target figures. One factor only correlated with verdicts in the case of theft, namely seeing the defendant as untrustworthy correlated with convicting him. In the rape case impressions of the defendants were largely uncorrelated with verdict, although impressions of the victim were highly correlated with verdict. The results are interpreted in terms of the simultaneous operation of the principles of consistency, salience and post‐decision dissonance.

Jury Simulation: The Impact of Judge's Instructions and Attorney Tactics on Decisionmaking

gate the methodology of the jury simulation paradigm. Each of these studies isolated some of the pitfalls involved in generalizing from experiments to the real world. These studies suggested that the method of presenting the stimulus,' with whom the decision rests2 and the consequences of the decision3 may all have a significant effect on the outcome of the laboratory experiment. One possible criticism of most laboratory studies is the failure to include judicial instructions. After jury selection has taken place, jurors take an oath. In this oath they promise to do two things: 1) to decide the case solely on the facts as developed from the evidence and 2) to uphold the law as it is given to them by the court. The stimulus for most laboratory experiments, however, has been some sort of presentation of the facts with judicial instructions omitted. In a real trial the judicial instructions are never optional. Judicial instructions often provide specific guidelines as to how jurors are supposed to respond to some of the typical independent variable manipulations that are found in laboratory simulations. For instance, in regard to the extraevidential factor of the judge's personality or demeanor, the following judicial caution is often given:

Reversing Authoritarian Punitiveness: The Impact of Verbal Conditioning

Half of each of two groups of initially high- or low-authoritarian subjects were exposed to verbal conditioning procedures in which the authoritarianism scores of high authoritarians were decreased, while those of low authoritarians were increased. The remaining halves were assigned to control groups in which no conditioning was utilized. All subjects then participated in a simulated jury task in which guilt, sentencing, and parole recommendations were made for either positively or negatively characterized defendants. A significant (p < .05) three-way interaction indicated that the conditioning procedure was effective in reversing the usual patterns of authoritarian bias. Conditioned low authoritarians' sentence recommendations were biased against negatively characterized defendants while those of conditioned high authoritarians showed no bias as a function of defendant character. In the control conditions the usual pattern of bias among high but not low authoritarians was replicated. The findings were interpreted as mediated by social approval processes. One of the aims discussed in The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950) was to develop procedures by which to change authoritarian characteristics.

Factors affecting testimony about mitigating circumstances and the fixing of punishment.

Although trial attorneys typically choose to have defendants testify on their own behalf, there are data from studies using simulated juries which suggest that the presentation of favorable testimony by defendants might be harmful. Data from these studies are suspect, however, because subjects' verdicts had no realworld consequences. In the present study the real-world consequentiality of subjects' verdicts (some vs. none), the presence of mitigating testimony (some vs. none), the source of the mitigating testimony (defendant vs. third party), and the credibility of mitigating testimony (high vs. low) were all manipulated in order to test their effects on the severity of penalities subjects assigned. The results showed that among subjects whose decisions were of no consequence, none of the other manipulated variables produced any reliable differences. On the other hand, among those who thought their decisions were of real consequence, less severe penalties were given when mitigating testimony was presented as opposed to when it was not, and more interestingly, this was true regardless of the testimony's source. The results are seen as underlining the importance of inducing a sense of consequence in simulated jury studies.

The other issues in jury simulation research: A commentary with particular reference to defendant character studies.

The other issues in jury simulation research: A commentary with particular reference to defendant character studies.

A critical review of the jury simulation paradigm: The case of defendant characteristics.

While empirical study of the jury has a long history (cf. Marston, 1924), recent years have witnessed a substantial expansion of research interest. Especially noticeable has been the proliferation of studies involving attempted simulation of jury functioning. The recent popularity of the jury simulation paradigm is probably due to researchers' perception that it offers both theoretical and pragmatic potential. The jury's task, that of making a social judgment based on various kinds of information, provides an arena in which social psychologists can test a variety of theoretical conceptions: the just-world model (Jones & Aronson, 1973), the reinforcement model of attraction (Mitchell & Byrne, 1973), information integration theory (Kaplan & Kemmerick, 1974), social decision scheme models (Davis, Kerr, Atkin, Holt, & Meek, 1975), attribution theory (Izzett & Fishman, 1976), and equity theory (DeJong, Morris, & Hastorf, 1976). At the same time, because of the intrinsic difficulties associated with research on actual juries, the jury simulation paradigm offers an apparently reasonable source of pragmatic insights about jury functioning. For example, legal prohibitions enacted to ensure absolute privacy for the jury (Burchard, 1958) bar social scientists at the door when a real jury retires for deliberation. In addition, the behavioral scientist can exercise only limited experimental control over court

Personality inference from voice quality: The loud voice of extroversion

AbstractInvestigated the process of personality inference from voice quality using 24 male American stimulus persons who served as subjects in simulated jury discussions. Applying a Brunswikian lens model of the inference process, criteria, distal cues, proximal cues and attributions were measured by independent groups of judges: personality criteria by three peers of each stimulus person and, on the basis of content‐masked voice samples, distal voice quality indicator cues by six phoneticians, proximal voice percept by ten naive judges, personality attributions by nine naive judges. Only extroversion attributions correlate significantly with the criterion, replicating earlier findings. For the inference of extroversion, contrary to other traits which apparently cannot be inferred accurately from voice quality, the following conditions are met: (a) the criterion is associated with ecologically valid voice energy cues (vocal effort and dynamic range), (b) these indicator cues are adequately represented as proximal voice percepts (particularly loudness and sharpness), and(c) percept utilization in the judges' inferential strategy corresponds to the association between criterion and distal indicator cues. Path‐analytic procedures are used to test empirically the adequacy of the inference model to (a) account for the variance in the attributions, and (b) explain significant correlations between criteria and attributions in terms of mediating variables.