John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York.
The Graduate Center, The City University of New York.
Top Cogn Sci. 2019 Oct;11(4):627-643. doi: 10.1111/tops.12435. Epub 2019 Jun 23.
The jury is a defining component of the American criminal justice system, and the courts largely assume that the collaborative nature of jury deliberations will enhance jurors' memory for important trial information. However, research suggests that this kind of collaboration, although sometimes improving memory, can also lead to incomplete and inaccurate "collective" memories. The present research examines whether jury deliberations, where individuals collaboratively recall and discuss trial evidence to render unanimous verdicts, might shape jurors' memories through the robust phenomena of Within-Individual and Socially Shared Retrieval-Induced Forgetting (WI-RIF and SS-RIF, respectively). The results revealed no WI-RIF or SS-RIF. However, we did find evidence in the direction of Within-Individual and Socially-shared Retrieval Induced Facilitation (WI-RIFA and SS-RIFA, respectively) in speakers' and listeners' narrative and open-ended recall of evidentiary details. The present results are discussed in terms of whether jurors' goals during deliberation and the deliberation structure (e.g., six or more discussants) protect against forgetting, or whether possible methodological issues (e.g., the vast amount of information presented) eliminated WI-RIF and SS-RIF and, in turn, make drawing conclusions surrounding the mnemonic impact of jury deliberation difficult. Regardless, the present results suggest jury deliberations are quite limited in terms of how much evidence is actually discussed compared to the total of what could be discussed, and our methodology provides an ecologically valid baseline for future research to better understand the mnemonic consequences associated with jury deliberations and, in turn, jury decision making.
陪审团是美国刑事司法系统的一个决定性组成部分，法院在很大程度上假设陪审团审议的协作性质将增强陪审员对重要审判信息的记忆。然而，研究表明，这种协作虽然有时可以改善记忆，但也可能导致不完整和不准确的“集体”记忆。本研究考察了陪审团审议——个人协作回忆和讨论审判证据以做出一致裁决——是否可能通过个体内和社会共享检索诱导遗忘（分别为 WI-RIF 和 SS-RIF）来塑造陪审员的记忆。结果没有发现 WI-RIF 或 SS-RIF。然而，我们确实在演讲者和听众对证据细节的叙事和开放式回忆中发现了个体内和社会共享检索诱导促进（分别为 WI-RIFA 和 SS-RIFA）的证据。本研究结果从以下几个方面进行了讨论：审议期间陪审员的目标和审议结构（例如，六名或更多讨论者）是否可以防止遗忘，或者可能存在的方法问题（例如，大量信息的呈现）是否消除了 WI-RIF 和 SS-RIF，进而使得围绕陪审团审议的记忆影响得出结论变得困难。无论如何，本研究结果表明，与可以讨论的全部证据相比，陪审团审议实际上讨论的证据数量相当有限，我们的方法为未来研究提供了一个生态有效的基线，以更好地了解与陪审团审议相关的记忆后果，进而了解陪审团决策。
