The influence of event order on the narratives jurors construct and tell in cases of rape

ABSTRACT

Rape victim testimony may seem incongruent with the ‘real rape’ stereotype and appear more consistent with typical consensual sex. This research investigated whether having victims describe stereotype-consistent events early in their testimony guides jurors to construct narratives of the evidence that are consistent with rape and depict the defendant as guilty. In Study 1, a convenience sample (N = 38, 65.79% female, 34.21% male) watched video testimony in which the victim described the details of the assault first or last, with participants verbalising their thoughts about the testimony as they watched. We then recorded participants’ spoken narratives about the alleged rape, which community members (N = 418, 41.15% female, 58.61% male, 0.24% gender-fluid) evaluated in Study 2. In Study 1, participants’ thoughts in the rape-first condition suggested they attended more to the victim’s non-verbal cues to deception than the events described. Consistent with this, participants in Study 2 rated the narratives of those in the rape-first condition as less complete. However, counter to predictions, participants’ perceptions of the narratives as typical of rape did not differ based on condition. Further, participants were less likely to find the defendant guilty after listening to the narratives of those in the rape-first condition.

KEYWORDS:

• rape
• schema theory
• narratives
• trial interventions
• juror decision making

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/nc9d3/ (videos used in Study 1; details on measures can be found in the pre-registrations associated with this study) and https://osf.io/ay2en/ (narratives and credibility measure used in Sudy 2; details on other measures can be found in the pre-registration for this study and in the manuscript itself), https://osf.io/yf4ja/ (data for both studies), and https://osf.io/w68js (Think aloud methods and Leximancer analyses for Study 1), https://osf.io/a43y7 (method for collecting verbalised narratives for Study 1), and https://osf.io/z2shr (Study 2). .

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Lachlan Brown who assisted with the content analysis in Study 2 and Brooklyn Corbett who provided the video of the think-aloud tutorial for Study 1. We also wish to thank Elizabeth Reeves for her helpful comments on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data presented in this research can be found at https://osf.io/yf4ja/.

Notes

1 Based on substantial evidence showing that the findings of trial research sampling students are generalisable to the wider population (Bornstein et al., 2017) and Lee et al. (2021) finding no differences between student and community samples in how they evaluated a victim’s evidence based on the order in which she described it, we decided that recruiting both students and community members in Study 1 would be appropriate. Further, in Study 2 we cross-checked if the effects of testimony order on how participants rated the narratives were influenced by whether the participant in Study 1 was a student or community member. We do note, however, that the findings of these exploratory analyses may be unreliable as more narratives were generated by students compared to community members (thus creating uneven cell sizes). Results showed no interactions between testimony order and sample type, ps > .463. As such, recruiting both students and community members in Study 1 did not appear to impact participants’ evaluations of the narratives in Study 2.

2 As mock jurors may engage with research tasks to a lesser extent when a study is conducted online compared to in a laboratory (Sivasubramaniam et al., 2020), we assessed whether the narratives differed based on where Study 1 was conducted. Specifically, we compared the means of participants’ evaluations of the narratives on each of the dependent measures in Study 2: rape typicality (Online: M = 4.79, SD = 1.34; Laboratory: M = 4.77, SD = 1.20), consensual sex typicality (Online: M = 2.98, SD = 1.61; Laboratory: M = 3.04, SD = 1.49), rape likelihood (Online: M = 4.77, SD = 1.36; Laboratory: M = 4.55, SD = 1.14), guilt likelihood (Online: M = 4.66, SD = 1.43; Laboratory: M = 4.61, SD = 1.27), story similarity (Online: M = 4.36, SD = 1.64; Laboratory: M = 3.83, SD = 1.73), story completeness (Online: M = 3.45, SD = 1.60; Laboratory: M = 3.05, SD = 1.63), story confusion (Online: M = 3.83, SD = 1.71; Laboratory: M = 4.21, SD = 1.69), narrative persuasiveness (Online: M = 3.81, SD = 1.57; Laboratory: M = 3.41, SD = 1.58) and narrator credibility (Online: M = 123, SD = 31.10; Laboratory: M = 117, SD = 32.10). As such, participants’ evaluations of the narratives in Study 2 did not appear to differ significantly based on the mode of testing in Study 1.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship awarded to Harrison Lee.