NCJ Number
179061
Journal
Law and Human Behavior Volume: 23 Issue: 5 Dated: October 1999 Pages: 557-575
Editor(s)
Richard L. Wiener
Date Published
October 1999
Length
19 pages
Annotation
This study considered the effect of jury deliberation on jurors' reasoning skill in a murder trial.
Abstract
The experiment examined whether involvement in the jury process encouraged jurors to reason in a more sophisticated way than they would prior to deliberations. This led to two hypotheses. First, it was hypothesized that mock jurors would function at a higher level of reasoning after group deliberations than prior to discussing the case with a group. Second, verdicts of postdeliberation jurors were expected to be more moderate than those of predeliberation jurors. A total of 104 participants viewed a videotaped murder trial and either deliberated in 12-person juries or ruminated on the case individually. Among those assigned to juries, half had their reasoning skill assessed prior to deliberation, and the other were tested after deliberating. Jurors in the individual-rumination condition were assessed after they had the opportunity to reflect on the case alone. As hypothesized, post-group-deliberation jurors were more likely to discount both the selected verdict and alternative theories and incorporate judgmental supporting statements than were the other mock jurors; however, the mock jurors did not differ with regard to making statements that supported alternative verdicts or including judgmental statements that discounted their chosen verdict. In terms of Kuhn's (Kuhn, Weinstock, and Flaton, 1994) reasoning continuum from "satisficing" (low level) to theory-evidence coordination (high level), there is some evidence that post-group-deliberation jurors may be closer to the high end than predeliberation jurors or post-individual-rumination jurors in some aspects of the task, but not in others. 3 tables and 34 references