The influence of attorney anger on juror decision making

Abstract

We investigated the interactive effect of attorney anger expression and attorney gender on juror decision-making. Jury eligible Amazon MTurk participants (N = 455) were recruited. They listened to an audio recording of a male or female prosecutor delivering a closing statement with varying levels of authenticity (authentic, inauthentic or no anger). Then, they rendered a verdict. After the verdict, participants filled out various measures: guilty verdict confidence, current feelings of anger, and perceptions of prosecutor trust and competence. We found that the prosecutor’s authentic displays of anger provoked anger in the participants, which, subsequently, increased the odds of a guilty verdict and guilty verdict confidence. Moreover, authentic displays of anger improved perceptions of the prosecutor’s competence, which also increased the odds of a guilty verdict. However, perceptions of the prosecutor’s trustworthiness did not vary, and attorney gender did not play a moderating role. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Key words:

• anger
• attorney
• authenticity
• competence
• contagion
• emotion
• emotional as social information
• jury decision-making
• trustworthiness
• verdict

Ethical standards

Declaration of conflicts of interest

Samuel Choi has declared no conflicts of interest

Narina Nuñez has declared no conflicts of interest

Benjamin M. Wilkowski has declared no conflicts of interest

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee [Institutional Review Board at the University of Wyoming; Protocol #20181116SC02192] and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study

Notes

1 Except for the planned contrasts and indirect effects, we reanalyzed all of the data in the Results section with participant gender as a covariate. None of the p values differed in terms of statistical significance with participant gender included in the models.

2 The lower than expected degrees of freedom were due to Levene’s correction for the violation of homogeneity of variance, mentioned in the ‘Data Screening and Corrections for Multiple Contrasts’ subsection. We used such corrections as these for any analyses violating the homogeneity assumption.

3 Unfortunately, the mma function does not provide unstandardized regression coefficients for the predictor-to-mediator and mediator-to-outcome paths. To remedy this issue, we have included separate analyses for each of the paths within the text of the Results section. The reader may refer to these analyses to infer the direction of the relationships.

4 A Levene’s test revealed a violation in homogeneity of variances for the 3 (prosecutor authenticity: authentic, inauthentic, no anger) × 2 (prosecutor gender: male versus female) factorial ANOVA predicting competence. To correct for this violation, we used heteroscedasticity-consistent standard error estimators for ordinary least squares (OLS) regression recommended by Hayes and Cai (862007). To use this correction, we converted our two-way ANOVA to fit a regression model. Authenticity was dummy coded so that the no-anger or inauthentic group served as the reference groups (0) in contrast to authentic group (1), yielding two contrasts of interest. Then, we inserted authenticity, prosecutor gender and the interaction into Model 1 of Hayes’ (862018) PROCESS Macro and requested the heteroscedasticity-consistent inference (HC3). For both contrasts, authenticity still maintained highly significant main effects (ps < .001). In addition, the main effect of gender and the interaction still remained non-significant. Therefore, we retained our inferences above.