Department of Psychology, University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee.
Department of Mental Health Law & Policy, University of South Florida.
Law Hum Behav. 2017 Oct;41(5):478-493. doi: 10.1037/lhb0000256. Epub 2017 Jul 17.
This experiment explored how mock-jurors' (N = 648) guilt decisions, perceptions of the defendant, memories, and evidence interpretation varied as a function of jury type and pretrial publicity (PTP); utilizing a 2 (jury type: pure-PTP vs. mixed-PTP) × 3 (PTP: defendant, victim, and irrelevant) factorial design. Mock-juries (N = 126) were composed of jurors exposed to the same type of PTP (pure-PTP; e.g., defendant-PTP) or different types of PTP (mixed-PTP; e.g., half exposed to defendant-PTP and half to irrelevant-PTP). Before deliberations jurors exposed to defendant-PTP were most likely to vote guilty; while those exposed to victim-PTP were least likely. After deliberations, jury type and PTP affected jurors' guilt decisions. Specifically, jurors deliberating on pure-PTP juries had verdict distributions that closely resembled the predeliberation distributions. The verdict distributions of jurors on mixed-PTP juries suggested that jurors were influenced by those they deliberated with. Jurors not exposed to PTP appeared to incorporate bias from PTP-exposed jurors. Only PTP had significant effects on postdeliberation measures of memory and evidence interpretation. Mediation analyses revealed that evidence interpretation and defendant credibility assessments mediated the effect of PTP on guilt ratings. Taken together these findings suggest that during deliberations PTP bias can spread to jurors not previously exposed to PTP. In addition, juries composed of jurors exposed to different PTP slants, as opposed to a single PTP slant, can result in less biased decisions. Finally, deliberating with others who do not share similar biases may have little, if any, impact on biased evidence interpretation or memory errors. (PsycINFO Database Record
本实验探究了模拟陪审员（N=648）的有罪判决、对被告的认知、记忆和证据解释如何随陪审团类型和庭前宣传（PTP）而变化；采用 2（陪审团类型：纯 PTP 与混合 PTP）×3（PTP：被告、受害者和不相关）因子设计。模拟陪审团（N=126）由接受相同类型 PTP（纯 PTP；例如，被告 PTP）或不同类型 PTP（混合 PTP；例如，一半接受被告 PTP，一半接受不相关 PTP）的陪审员组成。在审议前，暴露于被告 PTP 的陪审员最有可能投票有罪；而暴露于受害者 PTP 的陪审员最不可能投票有罪。审议后，陪审团类型和 PTP 影响陪审员的有罪判决。具体而言，在纯 PTP 陪审团中审议的陪审员的判决分布与审议前的分布非常相似。在混合 PTP 陪审团中审议的陪审员的判决分布表明，陪审员受到与他们一起审议的陪审员的影响。未接触 PTP 的陪审员似乎将 PTP 陪审员的偏见纳入其中。只有 PTP 对审议后的记忆和证据解释有显著影响。中介分析表明，证据解释和被告可信度评估中介了 PTP 对有罪评定的影响。综上所述，这些发现表明，在审议过程中，PTP 偏见可能会传播到以前未接触过 PTP 的陪审员身上。此外，由接触不同 PTP 倾向的陪审员组成的陪审团，而不是单一的 PTP 倾向，可能会做出偏见较小的决定。最后，与没有类似偏见的其他人一起审议可能对有偏见的证据解释或记忆错误几乎没有影响。
