Battling bias: can two implicit bias remedies reduce juror racial bias?

ABSTRACT

Two studies examined the effectiveness of the Unconscious Bias Juror (UBJ) video and instructions at reducing racial bias in Black and White mock-jurors’ decisions, perceptions, and counterfactual endorsement in a murder (Study 1; N = 554) and battery (Study 2; N = 539) trial. Participants viewed the UBJ video or not, then read pretrial instructions (general or UBJ), a trial summary, and posttrial instructions (general or UBJ). In Study 1, juror race moderated the effect of defendant race on verdicts, culpability, and credibility. White, but not Black, jurors demonstrated greater leniency toward Black defendants for verdicts, culpability, and credibility. The UBJ video moderated the effect of defendant race on murder counterfactual endorsement. Only when the video was absent was jurors’ counterfactual endorsement higher for the White versus Black defendant, which mediated the effect of defendant race on White jurors’ verdicts. In Study 2, White jurors were more lenient regardless of defendant race. Instructions and juror race moderated the video’s effect on credibility ratings. The video only influenced Black jurors’ credibility ratings. In conclusion, the debiasing interventions were ineffective in reducing racial bias in jurors’ verdicts. However, they do impact aspects of juror attribution and may be effective with modification.

KEYWORDS:

• Implicit bias remedies
• racial bias
• juror bias
• jury instructions
• crime type

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in OSF at https://osf.io/k5fpa/?view_only=9880bbc7e5fc47b6be7748995d2656b8. Project titled ‘The effectiveness of Two Unconscious Bias Remedies for Reducing Bias in Juror Decision Making.

Notes

1 ANCOVAs for the continuous variables and Logistic Regression for the dichotomous verdicts were run with participant gender entered as a covariate. Adding this covariate did not affect the overall pattern of results for any of the dependent measures. Also, only for the credibility ratings in Study 1 was there a significant effect of gender—but the pattern of results did not differ from analyses without the gender covariate. As can be seen in Table A (supplemental materials), gender percentages were similar across conditions. Therefore, analyses without the gender covariate are presented.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an award from the Chancellor’s Professional Support Initiative at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee. This funding source had no other role other than financial support.