Shari Seidman Diamond

Illuminations and Shadows from Jury Simulations

In the 18 years since authors in Law and Human Behaviors special issue on simulation research called for more realistic jury simulations, jury simulations of all kinds have proliferated. While simulations in general represent a significant improvement over nonempirical armchair speculation about jury behavior, the more ecologically valid features of recent simulations increase both the quality and the persuasiveness of simulation results. Still missing, however, are theories and a data base that will signal when these more elaborate and expensive design features are crucial.

Blindfolding the Jury to Verdict Consequences: Damages, Experts, and the Civil Jury

This research examines the behavior of jurors as active information processors. Our experimental examination of the performance of the civil jury in response to a complex price-fixing case varies the information provided to jurors about the consequences of their damage award decisions (i.e., the treble damage rule) and the type of expert testimony (statistical models vs. concrete yardstick models). We find, consistent with a picture of the jury as active rather than passive, that jurors are more likely to follow judicial instructions when they are given explanations rather than bald admonitions. In addition, complex expert testimony neither overpowers the jurors nor is dismissed by them. The expert presenting a statistical model is viewed as having higher expertise but lower clarity; as a result the statistical expert and the expert presenting a more concrete model are not significantly different in their persuasiveness. Finally, in contrast to most research on the criminal jury, we find that deliberations do affect jury awards.

Evaluating Videotaped Confessions Expertise Provides No Defense Against the Camera-Perspective Effect

False confessions extracted during police interrogations have been linked to the wrongful conviction of innocent people (Drizin & Leo, 2004; Dwyer, Neufeld, & Scheck, 2000). Many scientific, legal, and political leaders have called for mandatory videotaping of custodial interrogations as one solution to this troubling problem (e.g., Drizin & Reich, 2004). However, the well-documented phenomenon of illusory causation—the tendency for people to attribute unwarranted causality to a stimulus simply because it is more conspicuous than others—suggests that evaluations of videotaped confessions could be altered by presumably inconsequential changes in the camera perspective used at initial recording (McArthur, 1980; Taylor & Fiske, 1978). Indeed, a growing body of research demonstrates that simulated videotaped confessions recorded with the camera focused on the suspect—compared with videotapes from other camera points of view (e.g., focused equally on the suspect and interrogator)—lead jury-eligible individuals to assess that the confessions are more voluntary and that the suspects are more likely to be guilty (Lassiter, 2002; Lassiter, Geers, Munhall, Handley, & Beers, 2001). Actual criminal interrogations are usually videotaped with the camera focused on the suspect (Kassin, 1997), so the implications of these findings are alarming. The U.S. Supreme Court has established that criminal defendants are entitled to a pretrial determination of whether any confession they gave was voluntary, and that a confession is properly introduced at trial only if a judge has ruled that it was given voluntarily (Jackson v. Denno, 1964). Thus, judges play a critical role in determining what confession evidence juries are actually allowed to consider. It is important to assess, therefore, whether the decisions of judges are similarly influenced by camera perspective. It is possible that their greater knowledge, experience, and understanding of the law pertaining to confessions could immunize them against such an effect. Guthrie, Rachlinski, andWistrich (2002) investigated judges’ susceptibility to various cognitive illusions (e.g., the hindsight bias) and found that although judges were as susceptible to some illusions as laypersons, their relative performance with regard to other illusions was noticeably better. More recently, it has been shown that judges’ perceptions of a witness’s credibility—in contrast to those of laypersons—are unaffected by the witness’s potentially misleading emotional expression (Wessel, Drevland, Eilertsen, &Magnussen, 2006). Findings such as these raise the possibility that judicial experience and expertise help judges avoid the influence of camera perspective. Police interrogators are criminal-justice professionals with different, but nonetheless relevant, expertise. When conducting interrogations, veteran law-enforcement officers should be particularly vigilant about voluntariness, both because a confession that is not voluntary may indicate that the suspect is not guilty and because a confession that a court concludes is not voluntary will be inadmissible. Of course, unlike judges, police interrogators have no charge to determine the voluntariness of a confession before jurors see it. Nevertheless, their training and experience may also lead them to be less affected by camera perspective than laypersons are. Consistent with this possibility, recent research found that some highly experienced police officers viewing videotaped interrogations achieved higher accuracy rates with regard to detecting suspects’ lies than is typically found for nonprofessionals (Mann, Vrij, & Bull, 2004). To examine whether pertinent expertise can mitigate the camera-perspective effect, we enlisted 21 judges who had previously served as both prosecutors and criminal defense Address correspondence to G. Daniel Lassiter, Department of Psychology, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701, e-mail: lassiter@ohio. edu. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

The promise of a cognitive perspective on jury deliberation

Despite much psychological research regarding jury decision making, surprisingly little is known about the deliberation process that gives rise to jury verdicts. We review classic jury decision-making research regarding the importance of deliberation and more recent research, investigating deliberation and hung juries, that challenges the view that deliberation does not have an important impact on verdicts. We advocate greater attention to potential cognitive processes during deliberation that might explain the transition between predeliberation preferences and a jury’s ultimate verdict. We then review cognitive work in the group context generally, and the jury context specifically, illustrating the promise of a cognitive perspective on jury deliberation. Finally, we identify cognitive phenomena likely to be particularly valuable in illuminating deliberation behavior.

Legal Perceptions Of Science And Expert Knowledge

In the past half century, expert testimony has played an increasingly important role in American litigation. As the volume of expert testimony has grown, so have issues surrounding its admissibility into evidence. In the past decade, a trilogy of U.S. Supreme Court cases redefined the rules governing admissibility. This article reviews these cases and examines some of the assumptions about expert knowledge implicit in the opinions. It argues that the opinions ask judges to assume the role of scientific methodologists. Together, the 3 opinions reflect what Steven Cole calls a realist-constructivist view of science. Science is socially constructed both in the laboratory and in the wider community, but the construction is constrained by input from the empirical world.

A Courtroom Experiment on Juror Selection and Decision-Making

most of the work has been done in the laboratory with mechanically reproduced trials and frequently using students as jurors. There is always a haunting suspicion that information gleaned from such special settings and subject populations will not apply to real jury trials. The study reported here attempted to reduce the distance between experimental and real trial settings by comparing the decisions of real jurors viewing actual trials in a real courtroom situation.

Introduction: The Content, Method, and Epistemology of Gender in Sociolegal Studies

This Special Issue of the Law & Society Review devoted to gender and sociolegal studies focuses on one of the major political movements and intellectual challenges to the social sciences in the last years of the twentieth century.l The collection of articles explores some of the controversies that a focus on gender has raised and provides an opportunity to assess what we have learned so far. It can also help us in setting an agenda for further exploration and elaboration of the themes that a focus on gender has introduced. While this group of articles could not in the available space represent the whole of this complex and wide-ranging field,2 it offers a clear picture of the rich and varying work in sociolegal writing that has been inspired by the scholarly and political interest in gender. In this introduction, we provide a framework for understanding how the focus on gender goes beyond simply adding another variable to the empirical study of law and legal institutions. As the articles in this issue illustrate, an explicit focus on gender (as contrasted with the implicit study of gender by universalizing male experience) reveals new understandings, causing us not simply to add to our accumulated knowledge about sociolegal phenomena but also to rethink some of our theoretical frameworks and sources of hypotheses and to explore the deeper epistemological questions of how we know what we know and what we use to validate our knowledge. In the words of one feminist theorist, to focus on gender is to question everything (de Beauvoir 1949).

Goffman on the Jury: Real Jurors’ Attention to the “Offstage” of Trials

Social psychologist Erving Goffman, in his classic work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, provides a framework that explains why jurors may turn their attention at the courthouse to information not formally presented from the witness stand. We dub this “offstage observation,” a type of juror behavior that has not been systematically examined empirically. Analyzing a unique data source of 50 actual jury deliberations in civil trials, we find that jurors do look to the offstage in evaluating the claims of the parties. However, in contrast to predictions, these observations played a surprisingly minor role in the jury deliberation process.

Using Psychology to Control Law From Deceptive Advertising to Criminal Sentencing

Legal decision makers often fail to make use of relevant psychological research. In two areas, deceptive advertising and criminal sentencing, legal decision makershave welcomed social science research. In each, the research provided has been substantially flawed. Using a commercial that several courts evaluated for deception, I illustrate how the typical study that purports to measure deception produces results that are unnecessarily ambibuous. Then, based on research that looks closely at public responses to criminal cases, I show that the frequently cited survey measures of public preference reflect sentencing preferences for unrepresentative stereotypic criminal offenders. The weaknesses demonstated in these examples suggest that psychologists can present legal decision makers with a more accurate picture of human perceptions and preferences. If researchers present legal decision makers with informative research when the relevance of research is acknowledged, legal decision makers are likely to become more receptive and more knowledgeable when a new question warrants the application of social science evidence.

Empirical Analysis of Juries in Tort Cases

Juries attract both stiff criticism and unqualified praise. Here, we examine how the American juries actually behave in tort cases, based on archival research, post-trial interviews with jurors, experiments with real and simulated juries, observations of real jury deliberations, and surveys of judges and attorneys. We compare the external perspective of economic theory and the internal perspective of jurors and examine how the difference is reflected in jury behavior. Analyzing the key topics associated with charges of jury incompetence and bias in tort cases (i.e., decisions on liability; expert testimony; corporate defendants; separating decisions on liability and damages; assessment of compensatory damages; decisions on punitive damages; and comprehension and application of the law), we find that although it is unclear how well jurors act as risk managers, a role they are not instructed to play in the standard negligence case, juries in tort cases cope quite well with the conflicting evidence they are asked to judge. Finally, we analyze which aspects of less than optimal jury performance constitute insurmountable obstacles and which limitations can be overcome.