The Influence of Inconsistency in Eyewitness Reports, Eyewitness Age and Crime Type on Mock Juror Decision-Making

Evaluating Mock Jurors’ Judgements on Eyewitness Age, Inconsistencies and Crime Type

“…Numerous models of juror decision-making have been proposed to explain how jurors reach their verdicts. Some of these models use math or probabilities to explain jurors' decisions, while others use a narrative approach (i.e., storytelling; Devine, 2012;Devine & Caughlin, 2014;Sprottwood, 2014). The Bayesian Model, for example, uses a math-based approach to predict probabilities of various verdicts from jurors' initial thoughts of guilt and updates the probability of guilt as jurors receive new evidence.…”

“…A juror will use each critical piece of evidence introduced into a case to either increase or decrease their beliefs regarding each fact in question and may update their probability of guilt based on new facts so that each fact varies between zero (i.e., proven false beyond a reasonable doubt) and one (i.e., proven true beyond a reasonable doubt). It is posited that jurors will then apply these probabilities to weigh the evidence and reach a verdict (Devine, 2012;Devine & Caughlin, 2014;Sprottwood, 2014).…”

“…Despite the initial popularity of mathematical models, research has found that people do not think in probabilities (Devine, 2012;Devine & Caughlin, 2014). For example, the Bayesian Model is inconsistent with how jurors process information.…”

“…Finally, jurors must match their preferred story with a verdict (Devine, 2012). The process of using stories to organize information received during trial is called a narrative approach (Devine, 2012;Devine & Caughlin, 2014).…”

“…inconsistent) and will use the consistent information to mentally represent the events at trial and eventually build their final narrative. Therefore, jurors will use multiple sources of information and may pick and choose information relative to their script to create the narrative (Devine, 2012;Devine & Caughlin, 2014). To decide which narrative to choose to help guide their decisions, jurors will evaluate information based on coverage (i.e., how many facts can be covered by the story), coherence (i.e., does the story make sense logistically), and uniqueness (i.e., does the story provide good coverage and coherence; Devine, 2012).…”