Decision importance and Black and Hispanic jurors’ judgments of outgroup and ingroup defendants in a trial simulation

ABSTRACT

Because they involve important decisions, should actual trials involve less or more discrimination than trial simulations? Does discrimination occur when defendant and juror both belong to underprivileged groups? In two experiments employing a 2 (decision importance) X 2 (defendant ingroup/outgroup status) design, Black and Hispanic (and some White) college students read a robbery/murder trial transcript. The defendant belonged to participants’ racial/ethnic group or one of the others. Low-decision-importance instructions asked mock-jurors to consider the case carefully. High-decision-importance instructions emphasized the study was a government-sponsored assessment of jurors’ reasoning about a real trial with known guilt/innocence. In Experiment 1 (n = 118), outgroup discrimination – judging outgroup defendants more likely guilty – was evident only under high importance. In Experiment 2 (n = 135), which presented weaker prosecution of the trial and included processing-motivation measures, outgroup discrimination occurred regardless of importance. Black and Hispanic mock-jurors discriminated against defendants of the other group. Greater identity-related processing motivation was reported under high importance. High importance may reduce bias associated with heuristic processing, but promote bias through processing infused with evaluative associations involving social identity and race/ethnicity. The defendant outgroup discrimination regardless of importance suggests prejudice observed in trial simulations may generalize to actual trials.

KEYWORDS:

• Juror decision-making
• prejudice
• decision importance
• social identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The photos were drawn from a large database developed and reported by Minear and Park (2004). The photos were full-face headshots. All of the faces used were drawn from the ‘neutral’ emotion category of faces in that database and selected to be of average attractiveness with race and ethnicity highly recognizable. In the case of the Black, Hispanic, and White defendants, the faces were selected from the corresponding racial/ethnic database categories, and the age category of 18–29 years. The Black, Hispanic, and White defendants were 20, 22, and 19 years of age, respectively.

2 In neither experiment were participants asked to recall or recognize the race/ethnicity of the defendant following the trial and the dependent measures. However, it can be noted that in a later, as-yet unpublished study by the senior author involving more than 150 participants that used the same defendant race/ethnicity manipulation as in Experiment 1 (i.e., a photo of the defendant just before the transcript and written mention of defendant race/ethnicity before the transcript and once in the transcript) and also included a defendant race/ethnicity manipulation check, 85% of the participants correctly identified the defendant’s race/ethnicity at the end of the experimental session. In Experiment 2, in addition to the explicit indications of the defendant’s race/ethnicity that were present in Experiment 1, participants were exposed to the photo of the defendant toward the end of the transcript. In the Leippe et al. (2017) experiment, which used the same defendant race/ethnicity manipulation and included a similar late exposure to the defendant’s photo, more than 97% of the participants accurately recalled the defendant’s race/ethnicity.

3 We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the possible influence of anti-ingroup stereotypes.

4 Additional analyses that included ‘sample’ – participants in the main experiment vs. participants in the additional not-Black-or-Hispanic sample – revealed that no Decision Importance X Sample interactions approached significance for any of the importance-related variables (all Fs < 1). High-vs-low differences in importance were virtually the same in both samples.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NSF: [Grant Number 1424798].