Judging Guilt: Implicit Evaluations of Defendants Predict Verdicts

Abstract

In three preregistered studies, we presented mock jurors with a fictional murder trial in which the evidence against a defendant was mixed: some witnesses provided testimony suggesting guilt while others sowed doubt. In all studies, implicit evaluations of the defendant, operationalized by the Affect Misattribution Procedure scores (AMP), uniquely predicted verdicts above and beyond explicit evaluations (Study 1-3), the reason for evidence exclusion (Study 2), and demographics of the defendant (Study 3). These findings advance our understanding of implicit social cognition by demonstrating that implicit evaluations operationalized the AMP scores can have predictive power in complex, ecologically rich contexts.