Victim impact statement and lay judges’ decision making: exploring cross-cultural and individual differences in East Asia

ABSTRACT

Research has shown that emotional testimony given by victims or their family can affect jurors’ or lay judges’ decision-making processes, but little attention has been paid to cross-cultural and individual variations. The present study examined whether cultural and individual differences were associated with how victim impact statement (VIS) affected mock lay judges’ decision making in East Asian contexts. Participants from Japan (n = 74) and Taiwan (n = 64) reviewed a transcript of a lay participation (or Saiban-In) trial with or without an emotional VIS by the bereaved family and then made verdict and sentencing decisions individually. The results showed no main and interaction effects of VIS and culture on verdict decision, perceived strength of evidence, and sentence decision. Regression analyses showed that Need for Affect predicted higher perceived strength of evidence against the defendant and more guilty verdicts, and the effects were stronger in the VIS condition. We concluded that emotional VIS in a written format may not be biasing by nature in East Asian contexts; however, including a VIS could risk the possibility of bias in the fact-finding process of lay judges with a higher tendency to approach emotional information.

KEYWORDS:

• Juror decision making
• emotion
• cultural differences
• individual differences
• victim

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The term ‘lay judge’ is used to denote Japanese and Taiwanese citizens who participate in a trial as ‘judges’ and make verdict and sentencing decisions alongside professional judges, as opposed to ‘jurors’ in jury systems.

2 In this study however, there was no difference in indecisiveness between the Japanese and Taiwanese samples (t(136) = -0.03, p = .98), so we focused only on the effects of indecisiveness on trial outcome variables in the composite sample.