Press articles and influence processes: the different effects of incriminating information and crime story information on judgments of guilt

Abstract

The present study examines how potential jury members' judgments are affected by two types of information provided by the media: (1) information that is directly incriminating for the accused and (2) crime story information, that is, information about the events of the crime but not directly pertaining to the defendant's innocence or guilt. Although the influence of directly incriminating information has been widely researched, the effect of crime story information has never been studied. Our objective was to test the hypothesis that incriminating information affects judgments directly, whereas crime story information affects judgments indirectly via the arousal of negative emotions. We did this by coding the two types of information in 78 press articles about a criminal trial heard in France. Participants (N = 312) were asked to read the articles and then indicate their anger arousal and give their judgment about the accused. The results support our hypothesis. We conclude by discussing the contribution of our findings to research into the media's influence on legal cases.

Keywords:

• media
• incriminating information
• crime story
• judgments
• emotions

Notes

1. The types of information defined by the ABA as prejudicial are (1) the accused's criminal record; (2) the accused's character or reputation; (3) the existence or contents of any confession, admission, or statement given by the accused, or the refusal or failure of the accused to make a statement; (4) the performance of any examinations or tests, or the accused's refusal or failure to submit to an examination or test; (5) possible negotiations with the prosecutor to reduce the seriousness of the charges (plea bargaining); and (6) opinions about the guilt or innocence of the accused or concerning the admissibility of evidence.

2. The ‘Anger’ scale initially used by Goldberg et al. (1999) contained six items. The ‘arousal’ item was not included in our study because of translation concerns. In addition, we dropped the sadness item from the scale because studies suggested that anger and sadness have different effects on information processing (Feigenson & Park, 2006). The results of the present study remained unchanged when the sadness item was included in the scale.