So what influences jurors?
So I’ve already said that the biggest influence on jurors' decisions is the strength of the
evidence against the defendant. Now we turn to how factors other than the evidence influence
jurors' decisions. Obviously these are the things we want to know about so that we can
reduce their effects.
Let's start with the characteristics of the defendant.
Physically attractive defendants are more likely to be acquitted
or receive a lighter sentence. This is true as long as the defendant
didn't use his or her attractiveness to actually carry out the crime. For example by swindling
someone out of money by romancing them.
The defendant's race also has an affect the jury. In the United States of America, Black
defendants are more likely to be sent to prison. In fact, racial minorities
are over-represented in custody around the world. For example, not only in the United
States of America, but also in the United Kingdom
and Australia.
There is reasonable evidence from meta-analyses across many studies
that there is a main effect of defendant race. This means people from negatively stereotyped
racial groups tend to be more likely to be convicted.
Ok, so there is evidence that defendants from some categories are seen as being more likely
to be guilty. There is some more research which suggests that the story is more complicated
than this, however.
The short story is that defendants seem to be seen as being more likely to be guilty
only when they come from social categories that are stereotypically linked to the features
of the particular crime they are said to have committed. A good example of this can be seen
in research by Gordon and colleagues in 1988.
In that study, they found that when the defendant’s race matched the type of crime the defendant
was said to have committed, the defendant was evaluated more negatively. In particular,
a White defendant was punished more than a Black defendant when the alleged crime was
embezzling money, whereas the opposite was true when the alleged crime was burglary.
You can find another example of exactly the same type of effect in a study by Bodenhausen
in 1990.
One of the factors that contributes to higher conviction rates in these types of cases was
identified by Jones and Kaplan in 2003. They found that when the defendant matched race-based
expectations for the type of crime allegedly committed, mock jurors sought less additional
information to help them make a decision, and instead relied on their pre-existing stereotypes.
We get similar effects based on socio-economic status as well.
So there is reasonable evidence that the reason why people from some racial or ethic groups
are sometimes seen as more likely to be guilty is because stereotypes about those groups
are linked to particular types of crime.
So we know that the defendant's attractiveness, race, and socio-economic status all influence
how jurors see them.
What about the defendant's gender?
In a similar vein, non experimental research has found that prosecutors are less likely
to file charges against female than male narcotic offenders, judges are
more likely to grant women pretrial release than they are to male offenders,
and women face lower odds of incarceration following trial compared
to men.
The relationship between defendant gender and judgements is more complicated. There
doesn't appear to be a simple overall main effect of defendant gender, except perhaps
for punishment. Sometimes men are seen as more guilty, and sometimes women are treated
more harshly.
A good example of the first type of effect can be seen in a meta-analysis across a large
number of studies by Dean and colleagues in 2000. That study showed that male defendants
were more likely to be found guilty of some particular types of crimes, particularly assault
and theft.
Another good example of the first type of effect can be seen in research by McCoy and
Gray in 2007.
In this paper, they found that the mock jurors, people pretending to be jurors for the purposes of the study,
believed the victim more when the defendant was described as being a man compared to a
woman. In other words, the defendant seemed more guilty when he was a man rather than
a woman.
The explanation that is generally given for these types of effects is that men are stereotypically
seen has having more of the characteristics consistent with being a criminal - in particular,
they are seen as more aggressive and assertive and so on.
Now, you might be wondering, isn’t it perfectly rational to think that a male defendant is
more likely to be guilty than a female defendant? After all, the vast majority, as in well over
90%, of all people charged and convicted of crimes, especially those involving violence,
are men.
So it seems that the stereotype is based on accurate facts in this particular example—i.e.,
the base rate for offending is strongly skewed towards male offenders. Why can’t we just
make a probabilistic judgement based on these base rates and convict male defendants?
Well the problem arises because defendants are not selected at random. When police investigate
a crime, they don't just choose any random person on the street and charge them with
the offence.
Police investigate someone based on non-random factors, for example a tip off, or a witness
identification, and so base rate information is actually irrelevant for deciding whether
the defendant is guilty or not. Thus, jurors should make their decisions based only the
evidence presented at trial.
Now on the other hand, there is evidence that sometimes female defendants are treated more
harshly compared to male defendants.
Wayne and colleagues in 2001 found that a woman who sexually harassed a man was viewed
more negatively than a man who sexually harassed a woman, possibly due to stereotypes about
traditional sex roles and sexual aggressiveness.
Viki and colleagues in 2005 found that a female who murdered a number of children was evaluated
more negatively by participants who scored higher on a measure of sexism.
There is also some evidence that women get evaluated more negatively because they seem
to be 'out of place' in the criminal justice system, and so their behaviour
is seen as particularly abnormal.
So why might these types of effects reverse in this way?
Well, there are a few possible reasons.
The first has to do with how we think about men and women in comparison to gender-based
standards and the types of questions we are asking ourselves.
A zero-sum or absolute judgment task, like deciding whether the defendant is guilty or
not, will tend to encourage seeing the defendant in terms of the stereotype associated with
them. For example, when thinking about the guilt of a male defendant, we might think
he is guilty because we see him in terms of the male stereotype which is more consistent
with the attributes of a criminal.
When the task is a subjective one in that we are asking ourselves how much of some attribute
a defendant has, for example how aggressive the defendant's behaviour was, then we contrast
their behaviour with our expectations for their gender. In this case, we would see a
female defendant's behaviour as being more aggressive than a male defendant's behaviour,
even if they had both objectively acted in exactly the same way. This is called shifting
standards.
The final reason is related to thinking about jurors as cognitive optimisers. We talked
about this in the previous video. Remember we talked about how when a defendant is stereotypical,
perceivers have more cognitive capacity to think about other things, such as the strength
of the evidence against the defendant.
This means that when the case is strong, jurors will be more likely to convict the defendant,
and when the case is weak, they will be more likely to acquit. Now because female defendants
can't easily be represented by a stereotype, jurors should be relatively insensitive to
the strength of the case against the female defendant. And so, when the case is weak,
jurors should tend to acquit the male more compared to the female defendant. And the
opposite should happen when the case is strong.
Right, so we've spent a bit of time talking about how the defendant's attributes can influence
how jurors evaluate them. Now while these can be pretty difficult to change, research
is starting to identify some of the ways to potentially reduce their effects.
We probably don't have the time to get into those now, as we could spend another whole
course talking about how to reduce the effects of stereotypes.
But we can turn our eye to something that influences jurors' verdicts, and that is also
actually pretty easy to change.
We are talking about the order in which jurors are asked to decide verdicts in cases involving
more than one verdict.
This can happen, for example, in a murder case. A jury might be asked to decide whether
the defendant is guilty of murder, and if not murder, manslaughter, and if not that,
perhaps some lesser charge.
Greenberg, Williams and O'Brien in 1986 gave participants a condensed version of a murder
trial. The possible verdicts were first degree murder, second degree murder, voluntary manslaughter,
involuntary manslaughter, or not guilty.
After being given about six pages of judicial instructions by the experimenter, participants
were asked to consider the verdicts either from harshest to most lenient, as is usual
in murder trials, or from most lenient to harshest.
Results showed that participants gave harsher verdicts when they were asked to consider
'the first degree murder’ as the first possible verdict option compared to when they
were asked to consider 'not guilty' as the first possible verdict option.
Greenberg and colleagues thought that this was due to a confirmation bias, which is the
idea that when given a hypothesis to test, we tend to look for information that confirms,
rather than contradicts, that hypothesis. So when participants were given a hypothesis
by the first proposed verdict option, they focussed on the evidence in the case that
was consistent with that verdict. When given First Degree Murder as the first verdict,
participants were more influenced by evidence suggesting guilt. When given 'not guilty'
as the first verdict, they were more influenced by evidence suggesting that defendant was
innocent.
So that's a number of things that influence individual's decisions. One thing we haven't
talked about that has received quite a deal of attention in the research is expert evidence.
While stereotypes and schemas are important for how we evaluate expert testimony, it is
worth spending a bit more time in the next video talking about this type of testimony
because there are some additional unique issues to do with experts and their testimony.