Effects of the Defendant's Characteristics, Authoritarianism, and Group Discussion on Simulated Jurors' Decisions

• NCJ Number: 83036
• Author(s): R T Wyatt
• Date Published: 1982
• Length: 240 pages
• Grant Number(s): 78-NI-AX-0037
• Sponsoring Agency: US Dept of Justice
• Publication Format: Document
• Publication Type: Thesis/Dissertation
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Ohio University doctoral dissertation

Annotation

Simulation is used to examine the effects of the interaction of a defendant's characteristics with various degrees of juror authoritarianism and jury group discussion on jury decisions.

Abstract

Subjects recruited from a southeastern Ohio community made individual judgments on the guilt or innocence of a defendant in a murder case, discussed the case to produce group decisions, and then made individual judgments once again. The defendant's social and physical characteristics were either attractive or unattractive. Subjects were classified as either low, moderate, or high authoritarians based on their responses to a 46-item attitude scale. The attractive defendant was assigned more lenient verdicts and sentences than the unattractive defendant. High authoritarians, compared to low and moderate authoritarians, showed greater variability in the verdict choices, were more prone toward conviction, and assigned harsher sentences. Insignificant trends in sentencing decisions suggested that the defendant's attractiveness interacts with authoritarianism in such a manner that low authoritarians are overly lenient toward an attractive defendant, while high authoritarians are overly harsh toward an unattractive defendant. Group decisions reflected a substantial moderation of the biases caused by the defendant's attractiveness and by subjects' degree of authoritarianism. Predeliberation verdict distributions for the subjects differed significantly from the verdict distributions obtained from two undergraduate samples that responded to the same trial in different experiments. These differences, the effects of group discussion, and other results from the experiment indicate that differences in methodological strategies can substantially alter the outcomes of jury research. Implications of the results are discussed with respect to the judicial system and the validity and applicability of prior juridic research. Details of the research methodology and instrument are appended, and tabular data are provided, along with about 120 references and 15 notes. (Author abstract modified)