Justin D. Levinson

Innocent until primed: mock jurors' racially biased response to the presumption of innocence.

Background Research has shown that crime concepts can activate attentional bias to Black faces. This study investigates the possibility that some legal concepts hold similar implicit racial cues. Presumption of innocence instructions, a core legal principle specifically designed to eliminate bias, may instead serve as an implicit racial cue resulting in attentional bias. Methodology/Principal findings The experiment was conducted in a courtroom with participants seated in the jury box. Participants first watched a video of a federal judge reading jury instructions that contained presumption of innocence instructions, or matched length alternative instructions. Immediately following this video a dot-probe task was administered to assess the priming effect of the jury instructions. Presumption of innocence instructions, but not the alternative instructions, led to significantly faster response times to Black faces when compared with White faces. Conclusions/Significance These findings suggest that the core principle designed to ensure fairness in the legal system actually primes attention for Black faces, indicating that this supposedly fundamental protection could trigger racial stereotypes.

Culture, Cognitions, and Legal Decision-Making

The incorporation of psychological knowledge into legal models has helped to dramatically improve the laws human and behavioral competence. Each of the three developing areas discussed in this chapter has made great strides in building an accurate legal model of human behavior. Economic models of law that previously ignored systematic deviations from rational predictions now are behaviorally competent. Recent interdisciplinary projects have demonstrated that an important accomplishment of the building of an accurate and culturally competent legal behavioral model is within reach. Building such a model has major societal ramifications, from protecting victims of racial and cultural discrimination to ensuring a behaviorally and economically efficient system of rules. This chapter brings up-to-date legal scholarship incorporating cognitive, social, and cultural psychology; highlights new interdisciplinary research directions; and challenges psychologists and legal scholars to increase collaborations. Scholars that tended to ignore how the human mind really works now spend significant time thinking about how humanity, law, and economics intersect. As interdisciplinary collaborations continue to prosper, scholars will build an accurate, unbiased, and culturally competent legal economic model of behavior. Only then will behavioral law and economics truly achieve its goals. Given the overwhelming advantage of culture for individual and group survival, a psychological mechanism that ensures the individuals adherence to, and within-group maintenance of, the shared knowledge is critical. They are instances of symbolic threat; an impairment of social motives that we implicitly and explicitly subscribe to and strive for. The ways in which symbolic threats are experienced and managed depend to some extent on the individuals and their circumstance. This chapter considers the relationship between culture and human reactions to threats. While some animal species including humans physically threaten others to dominate and gain their own advantages, humans are unique in their ability to threaten self as well as others by using culturally shared meanings. Likewise, humans are capable of symbolically alleviating the psychological injuries experienced by self and others. In other words, culture is both an antecedent and a consequence of threat for an individual, with an important group-level implication of knowledge preservation. The more the given meaning is activated, used, and encoded in the memory of the people who participated in the event, the more likely it becomes that this meaning is used in the future of people.