The Psychology of Juries
Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:
https://medipdf.com/product/the-psychology-of-juries/
Click Download Now
To Craig Kovera: my husband, my best friend, and my biggest fan.
contents
Contributors.................................................................................................. ix
Preface........................................................................................................... xi
Introduction: An Overview........................................................................... 3
Margaret Bull Kovera
I. Important but Understudied Topics in Jury Research......................... 9
Chapter 1. Integrating Individual and Group Models
of Juror Decision Making................................................. 11
Lora M. Levett and Dennis Devine
Chapter 2. The Effects of Collaborative Remembering
on Trial Verdicts............................................................... 37
William Hirst and Charles B. Stone
Chapter 3. Integrating Concepts of Trial Advocacy
Into Juror Decision-Making Research............................. 59
Christina A. Studebaker
vii
Chapter 4. Studying the Effects of Race, Ethnicity,
and Culture on Jury Behavior.......................................... 83
Jennifer S. Hunt
Chapter 5. Juries Compared With What? The Need
for a Baseline and Attention
to Real-World Complexity............................................. 109
Jennifer K. Robbennolt and Theodore Eisenberg
Chapter 6. Global Juries: A Plan for Research................................. 131
Valerie P. Hans, Hiroshi Fukurai,
Sanja Kutnjak Ivković, and Jaihyun Park
II. Validity and Trial Simulation Methodology..................................... 159
Chapter 7. Jury Simulation Goals.................................................... 161
Jonathan J. Koehler and John B. Meixner, Jr.
Chapter 8. Managing Different Aspects of Validity
in Trial Simulation Research......................................... 185
Daniel A. Krauss and Joel D. Lieberman
Chapter 9. Jury Simulation Research: Pros, Cons,
Trends, and Alternatives................................................ 207
Brian H. Bornstein
Chapter 10. How Typical Is Lockhart v. McCree? Ecological
Validity Concerns in Court Opinions............................ 227
Mary R. Rose
III. Synthesis and Future Directions..................................................... 255
Chapter 11. Suggested Do’s and Don’ts for Future
Jury Research: A Swan Song.......................................... 257
Norbert L. Kerr
Conclusion: The Future of Jury Research.................................................. 287
Margaret Bull Kovera
Index.......................................................................................................... 299
About the Editor........................................................................................ 309
viii contents
contributors
Brian H. Bornstein, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of
Nebraska–Lincoln
Dennis Devine, PhD, Department of Psychology, Indiana University—
Purdue University, Indianapolis
Theodore Eisenberg, JD, Cornell University Law School, Ithaca, NY
Hiroshi Fukurai, PhD, Department of Sociology, University of California,
Santa Cruz
Valerie P. Hans, PhD, Cornell University Law School, Ithaca, NY
William Hirst, PhD, Department of Psychology, New School for Social
Research, New York, NY
Jennifer S. Hunt, PhD, Department of Psychology, Buffalo State College,
The State University of New York, Buffalo
Norbert L. Kerr, PhD, Department of Behavioral and Organizational
Sciences, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA; School
of Psychology, University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom; and
Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Jonathan J. Koehler, PhD, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law,
Chicago, IL
ix
Margaret Bull Kovera, PhD, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the
Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York
Daniel A. Krauss, JD, PhD, Department of Psychology, Claremont
McKenna College, Claremont, CA
Sanja Kutnjak Ivković, PhD, SJD, School of Criminal Justice, Michigan
State University, Lansing
Lora M. Levett, PhD, Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law,
University of Florida, Gainesville
Joel D. Lieberman, PhD, Department of Criminal Justice, University of
Nevada–Las Vegas
John B. Meixner, Jr., JD, PhD, Law Clerk for Judge Gerald E. Rosen of
the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan
Jaihyun Park, PhD, Department of Psychology, Baruch College and the
Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York
Jennifer K. Robbennolt, JD, PhD, College of Law, University of Illinois,
Champaign
Mary R. Rose, PhD, Department of Sociology, University of Texas, Austin
Charles B. Stone, PhD, Department of Psychology, John Jay College of
Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New
York, New York
Christina A. Studebaker, PhD, Master of Legal Studies, ThemeVision
LLC, Indianapolis, IN
x contributors
Preface
I have always been an avid reader. As a child, I could often be found
reading while I was walking, brushing my teeth, eating my meals, or doing
just about any other activity. When I was in eighth grade, my parents were
called into my principal’s office because I had been surreptitiously (or so I
thought) reading novels in band and algebra classes. Legal thrillers, especially
courtroom dramas, featured prominently in my reading list back then and
still do. Growing up reading these books, I thought I wanted to be a litigator.
That was until I spent the summer between my sophomore and junior years
in college at Northwestern working at one of the big law firms in Chicago. A
summer of typing memos written by summer interns and doing paralegal work
for corporate business deals, not to mention the condescending treatment of
the secretaries by the other staff, was not what I had envisioned when reading
those courtroom dramas. The experience convinced me that law school was
not something that I wanted to pursue.
Yet, returning to Northwestern for my junior year, I enrolled in a psychol-
ogy and law class, taught by Larry Heuer—then a postdoc at Northwestern’s
business school and now a professor at Barnard College—and first encountered
empirical research on jury decision making. I carried the textbook around with
me, much like I did those novels when I was a child, reading about studies in
xi
which researchers were seeking answers to important questions about whether
juries functioned as they should. Could they operate free from bias? Could they
disregard inadmissible evidence? Could they understand the instructions that
they were given by the judge? Some juries were tasked with deciding whether
people would die for the crimes they had committed. Could they do so fairly?
Were they competent to make the decisions that the law required of them?
It seemed to me that these were fundamental questions of great consequence
because these decision-making bodies had the power to deprive citizens of
their freedom and potentially their lives. Knowing that they could do so fairly
and competently was crucially important. I was hooked and have been study-
ing juries ever since.
I was not alone. Thousands of studies have been conducted on jury deci-
sions and behavior. But as years passed, and I developed from an emerging
jury scholar to an editor of Law and Human Behavior, serving as a gatekeeper
for what jury research was published, I noticed a concerning trend. Although
I was seeing many conference presentations and reading many manuscript
submissions describing jury research, I was often underwhelmed. In my opin-
ion, jury researchers were often spending valuable time and resources inves-
tigating questions that were not important, either theoretically or practically.
And as an editor, I noted that there were great disagreements among review-
ers of jury research about what types of methods were appropriate for studying
the questions under consideration.
When I took a systematic look at how jury research was faring in the
review process at Law and Human Behavior, my fears were confirmed. Between
January 2005 and mid-August 2014, although submitted articles were more
likely to address some aspect of jury decision making or behavior than any
other topic, research on juries was accepted at less than half of the rate of
research on other topics. For some reason, jury research was not faring well
in the review process. Although it is possible that reviewers of jury research
have higher standards for publication and presentation than reviewers in any
other area of social science and law, it is more likely that reviewers judge jury
research using the same criteria on which other papers are judged: (a) does
the paper make a significant contribution to the literature (i.e., is the research
question important?) and (b) are there methodological limitations of the
research? It is possible that the higher rejection rate for jury research may be
the result of fundamental disagreements among scholars about what questions
are important to ask and what methods are appropriate to use when collecting
data to answer those important questions.
One night over dinner, I expressed my concerns to Chris Meissner, then
program director of the Law and Social Science Program at the National
Science Foundation (NSF). He remarked that he and his colleagues also were
finding that many proposals for research to study jury decision making were
xii preface
not surviving the review process. Chris encouraged me to seek funding from
NSF for a conference on the future of jury research, at which leading law
and psychology scholars could come together to discuss the types of ques-
tions jury scholars might ask to move the field forward and tackle the ongoing
controversy about the desirability of different methodological features in
the research used to test those questions. With funding from NSF, 29 jury
scholars, including law professors, sociologists, criminologists, and psycholo-
gists, convened at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the City University
of New York (CUNY), to have those discussions. This volume is the culmi-
nation of the discussions that began at that conference but have continued
to evolve over time. I hope that our contributions to this volume inspire
those who read them to tackle new and important research questions with
as much methodological rigor as they can muster.
I am grateful for the financial support for the conference provided by
NSF under Grant Number SES-1155352. Any opinions, findings, and conclu-
sions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors
and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF. I am also grateful for the
logistical support provided by the Office for the Advancement of Research
at John Jay College—CUNY. Most of all, I am profoundly thankful to the
scholars who spent their valuable time traveling to New York City to spend a
day and a half pondering possible directions in which jury scholars might take
their research and to those who collected their thoughts more formally into
the contributions that appear in this volume. Special thanks go to Jennifer
Robbennolt, who agreed to step in and complete Ted Eisenberg’s chapter
when he passed away suddenly. Ted’s influence on the field is evident in this
volume, and his contributions to the future of jury research will be sorely
missed. And as always, I am indebted to Hope and Craig Kovera for their
patience with me when working on this book took time that I would rather
have been spending with them.
preface xiii
THE PSYCHOLOGY
OF JURIES
Introduction: An Overview
Margaret Bull Kovera
Trial by jury is the most rational and effective method for discovering
the truth.
—Sir John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England
I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor, ever yet invented by man,
by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.
—Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine
These statements represent long-held beliefs that trial by jury is the
superior method for the resolution of disputes, both between the government
and its citizens and between citizens. The jury was deemed so important by
the founders of the United States of America that the right to a jury was
guaranteed in three of the 10 amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights
to the Constitution. Juries serve as an important check against government
officials who might try to overreach with their authority (Amar, 1991). For
example, the Fifth Amendment provides for grand juries that are drawn from
among the citizenry to inquire into charges brought by prosecutors against
other citizens and that have the power to determine that there is insufficient
evidence for a prosecution to proceed. The criminal jury, a right guaranteed
under the Sixth Amendment, has the power to acquit a defendant who they
believe is being prosecuted with unreliable or manufactured evidence or to
acquit when they believe the law broken is unconstitutional. And the Seventh
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0000026-001
The Psychology of Juries, M. B. Kovera (Editor)
Copyright © 2017 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.
3
Amendment guarantees the right to a civil jury. Even amendments that do
not specifically mention juries implicate them (Amar, 1991). For example,
the Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful search and seizure is
enforced through juries who are the ultimate arbiters of whether a search was
reasonable and lawful. In sum, the jury serves as a powerful mechanism for
protecting citizens from improper governmental influence.
Because of the centrality of the jury to many of the protections afforded
to U.S. citizens under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it is crucial to
understand whether the jury functions as it is intended. Are juries fair and
impartial? Do they follow the law as it is given to them? Do they properly
evaluate the evidence before them? If the answer to these questions is no,
then it is also important to evaluate the effectiveness of any safeguards or
procedural innovations that might improve the function of the jury.
Perhaps it is not surprising, given the importance that the founders
placed on the jury in the U.S. Constitution, that the jury—as it operates in
the United States at least—has received considerable scholarly attention,
initially from legal scholars but more recently from social scientists. After
the publication of Kalven and Zeisel’s (1966) The American Jury, there was
an explosion of research on the jury. The Web of Science Social Science
Citation Index database lists over 3,700 articles on the topic of jurors or
juries and the PsycINFO database contains abstracts for almost 3,900 articles
on the topic. However, as we shall see in one of the chapters to come, the
publication rate of jury research has slowed in recent years, at least at one of
the major scholarly outlets for this type of research. Indeed, a scan of the
reference lists for the chapters contained in this volume suggests that much
of the influential work on jury decision making and behavior was conducted
decades ago.
Why has the volume of jury research—at least research that has been
published in high-quality scholarly outlets—seemingly slowed to a trickle?
Some scholars have complained about the variability in the methodological
quality of the research produced on jury behavior. Others have bemoaned
the seemingly limited impact that this voluminous jury scholarship has had
on judicial decision making, raising questions about whether jury scholars
are asking important or inconsequential research questions and whether they
are using appropriate methods to study jury behavior and decision making.
There is no question that to pass muster in the peer-review process it is essential
that an investigation tackles important questions using the most appropriate
methods for answering those questions.
In the interest of reinvigorating jury scholarship, this volume collects
the thoughts of a number of esteemed jury scholars in response to two general
questions: What are some important areas of inquiry that have been over-
looked by jury researchers, and what methods should researchers rely on when
4 margaret bull kovera
studying those questions? For anyone interested in how juries make decisions
and whether they do so competently, these scholars have provided compre-
hensive reviews of the literature addressing these questions. For consumers of
jury scholarship, including legal practitioners, there are helpful principles for
understanding how best to evaluate the quality of jury research. For both the
new and more established jury scholar, the authors have also illustrated new
areas of inquiry that are ripe for empirical investigation. There are enough
novel questions within the covers of this book to keep many laboratories
bustling for years to come.
The structure of the book reflects these two motivating questions, with a
set of chapters devoted to each question. In Part I (consisting of Chapters 1–6),
authors identify important, yet understudied, topics at the intersection of psy-
chology and law, review what research is currently available on the topics,
and then suggest new sets of research questions that would advance the field
theoretically or practically (and sometimes both). Specifically, the first two
chapters suggest new avenues for research that emphasize the importance of
studying the jury as a group rather than a collection of individual jurors. In
Chapter 1, Lora M. Levett and Dennis Devine—two scholars who have a par-
ticular interest in group processes in jury settings—describe a decision-making
model that integrates earlier work on group processes in social influence with
a psychological model of individual juror decision making (Devine, 2012).
The first half of the model describes how jurors use the evidence they hear
during trial to create narrative explanations or stories about how trial-related
events likely occurred. The second half of the model describes how the jury
chooses which of the jurors’ stories to endorse. In Chapter 2, cognitive psy-
chologists William Hirst and Charles B. Stone review research that challenges
legal assumptions that deliberation serves to correct errors in individual jurors’
memories of the trial evidence and the law.
The remaining chapters in Part I each address an important area of
inquiry related to jury decision making and functioning that needs further
attention from jury scholars. In Chapter 3, Christina A. Studebaker—
a respected trial consultant and jury scholar—argues that previous research
has neglected an examination of the myriad ways attorneys influence the trial
process, consequently influencing juror decisions. The bulk of the chapter
provides the reader with many examples of legal practice strategies that are
ripe for empirical investigation, reviewing whatever limited research is
available and suggesting new avenues for research.
In Chapter 4, Jennifer S. Hunt reviews the existing literature on the
effects of race, ethnicity, and culture as they relate to jury decisions and
behavior. She proposes a research agenda for studying the effects of race and
ethnicity on targets (e.g., defendants, victims) and subjects (i.e., jurors), as
well as examining the variability of behavior that occurs within different
introduction 5
