Prejudicial Attitudes in a Simulated Legal Context

Two related issues concerning guilt determinations in a simulated rape trial were examined: (a) the effect of prejudicial perceptions of the defendant and victim and (b) the inJPKt of judicial instructions. Two hundred fifty-five American students randomly assigned to I of 18 conditions were asked to assume the role of juror and to read an abbreviated transcript describing a rape trial. Both the victim and the defendant aggregate attribute ratings and the presence of judicial instructions were significant predictor variables of verdict. In contrast to previous investigations. victim r-=e was Dot predictive of verdict under the trial condition without judicial instructions.

Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1973

The experiment (N = 312) tested the effects of two types of pretrial publicity (PTP) on the guilt verdicts of simulated jurors. Heinous PTP was manipulated by varying the degree to which the lurid details of a rape-murder were presented to prospective jurors. Prejudgement PTP varied in the extent to w h c h it implied that

1973

The experiment (N = 312) tested the effects of two types of pretrial publicity (PTP) on the guilt verdicts of simulated jurors. Heinous PTP was manipulated by varying the degree to which the lurid details of a rape-murder were presented to prospective jurors. Prejudgement PTP varied in the extent to w h c h it implied that

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1984

Law and Human Behavior, 1989

This study examines juror decision making in civil suits against police officers alleged to have engaged in illegal searches, using simulated case materials and mock jurors drawn both from adults called for jury service and a student subject pool. The experiment assesses the impact of a cognitive process (the hindsight bias) and of individual attitudes on awards and finds that both are related to juror decisions. We test a theoretical model that specifies that both attitudes and outcome knowledge exercise their influence upon the damage award decision by means of their impact on interpretation of testimony. Causal models of the decision-making process appear to support the role played by interpretation of evidence as a mediator between individual attributes and juror decisions.

Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2008

This study involves scale development using theoretically derived items from previous measures and a lay consensual approach for generating new items. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to validate the emergent constructs assessing individual differences in attitudes of prospective jurors. Using case summaries, the Pretrial Juror Attitude Questionnaire (PJAQ) demonstrates superior predictive validity over commonly employed measures of pretrial bias. The PJAQ confirms the importance of theoretically derived constructs assessed by other scales and introduces new constructs to the jury decision-making literature. The attitudes assessed by the PJAQ are conviction proneness, system confidence, cynicism toward the defense, racial bias, social justice, and innate criminality. Implications for assessing such attitudes and for better understanding the decision-making process of jurors are discussed.

Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2008

This study involves scale development using theoretically derived items from previous measures and a lay consensual approach for generating new items. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to validate the emergent constructs assessing individual differences in attitudes of prospective jurors. Using case summaries, the Pretrial Juror Attitude Questionnaire (PJAQ) demonstrates superior predictive validity over commonly employed measures of pretrial bias. The PJAQ confirms the importance of theoretically derived constructs assessed by other scales and introduces new constructs to the jury decision-making literature. The attitudes assessed by the PJAQ are conviction proneness, system confidence, cynicism toward the defense, racial bias, social justice, and innate criminality. Implications for assessing such attitudes and for better understanding the decision-making process of jurors are discussed.

Applied Psychology in Criminal Justice, 2005

This study examined the effects of psycholegal knowledge on a mock jury decisionmaking task. Psycholegal knowledge was obtained by completion of a university course on psychology and law focusing on jury decision-making. It was predicted that psycholegal knowledge would enhance juror competence, motivation, and satisfaction with participation in the legal process. Mock jurors who had taken the course were compared with those who had not. Both groups were shown a videotape of a rape trial and participated in jury deliberations. Jurors trained in psycholegal knowledge voted for acquittal more often than those who were not. Additionally, trained jurors were more satisfied, were more confident that their jury reached a correct verdict, and believed more that their jury's decision was based on the evidence presented than did untrained jurors. Content analysis of jury deliberations found that trained jurors were more task oriented and focused on relevant evidence than untrained jurors. The feasibility of implementing a juror training program prior to jury service was discussed. The American jury system has come under fire in recent years in light of highly publicized and unpopular verdicts in cases such as Rodney King, Reginald Denny, and O.J. Simpson. Investigations by psychologists into jury decision-making have documented serious and numerous flaws in the present Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial by one's peers. These problems include, damages in civil cases (Robbennolt, Penrod, & Heuer, 1999), jurors' failure to comprehend judges' instructions (Shaw & Skolnick, 1995), jurors' preconceptions from prejudicial pretrial publicity that

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1979

Two experiments were conducted, one with a black population and the other with a white population, to assess the behavior of subject jurors in the judicial decision-making process. The simulated case was a trial for aggravated and forcible rape. The victim's race (black or white), the defendant's race (black or white), and the amount of evidence pointing toward guilt (near-zero, marginal, or strong) were systematically varied. After reading the case transcripts subjects made quasijudicial ratings on four dependent variables. The four variables were significantly correlated, and were summed to yield a culpability score for each subject. A 2~2~2x3 ANOVA performed on these scores indicated that the amount of evidence, the sex of the subject, the race of the victim, and the race of the defendant influenced the level of culpability either white or black jurors ascribed to a defendant. The results further showed that with only marginal evidence a defendant, either white or black, was considered more culpable if he was racially different from the jurors.

Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2004

The effects of prejudicial pretrial publicity (PYP) from physical and witness evidence on decisions made by trained and untrained mock jurors were compared. Mock jurors viewed a videotaped rape trial and participated in jury deliberations. Training consisted of completion of a university course on psychology and law. As expected, physical evidence PTP produced more guilty votes than witness or no PTP. Both types of PTP influenced untrained mock jurors' punishment preferences and perceptions of satisfaction and fairness, whereas trained mock jurors' opinions on these measures were unaffected by PTP. Deliberations of trained mock juries were more task-oriented and focused on relevant evidence and legal issues than that of their untrained peers. Limitations of this mock jury study were discussed. Recent trials of William Kennedy Smith, Mike Tyson, 0. J. Simpson, and Rodney King are examples of cases that have received large amounts of pretrial publicity (PTP) across the country. What is the impact of such publicity? Does PTP violate a defendant's Sixth Amendment right to trial by an impartial jury? Researchers have examined the effects of prejudicial PTP on jurors' attitudes and verdicts in laboratory and field studies and have found that jurors can be biased by such publicity, even those who claim to be impartial (Moran & Cutler, 1997). Jurors can be exposed to different types of PTP, such as factual descriptions of a defendant's past criminal record or unsavory character, prejudicial statements by authorities pointing toward guilt, and emotionally charged media images that sensationalize the criminal or the crime. Early studies of PTP found that mock jurors who were exposed to tabloid-style, affect-laden written descriptions of a criminal defendant had more biased pretrial attitudes than did others who read more neutral descriptions (Hoiberg & Stires, 1973; Simon, 1966).