Social Consciousness in Legal Decision Making

Wiener, Richard L.; Bornstein, Brian H.; Schopp, Robert F.; Willborn, Steven L.

doi:10.1007/978-0-387-46218-9

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...

Citation Types

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Year Published

2010

2011

Publication Types

Select...

Article3

Book2

Relationship

Self Cite0

Independent5

Authors

Journals

Cited by 11 publications

References 369 publications

(379 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

What are we studying? Student jurors, community jurors, and construct validity

Keller

Wiener

2011

Behavioral Sci & The Law

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Jury researchers have long been concerned about the generalizability of results from experiments that utilize undergraduate students as mock jurors. The current experiment examined the differences between 120 students (55 males and 65 females, mean age = 20 years) and 99 community members (49 males and 50 females, mean age = 42 years) in culpability evaluations for homicide and sexual assault cases. Explicit attitude measures served as indicators of bias for sexual assault, defendant, and homicide adjudication. Results revealed that student and community participants showed different biases on these general explicit attitude measures and these differences manifested in judgments of culpability (guilt likelihood, convincingness of state's arguments, convincingness of defendant's arguments, and the defendants' criminal intentions) in sexual assault and homicide case scenarios. The results also showed that student mock jurors were more lenient when assigning guilt in homicide cases than were community members. The implications for future mock jury research are discussed.

show abstract