Psychological Mechanisms Underlying the Biasing Effects of Voir Dire

预审是一种法律程序，在此过程中，律师和/或法官询问未来的陪审员，目的是发现可能阻止被告接受公平审判的偏见；那些被认为有偏见的陪审员可能会因理由受到质疑，并被免除陪审员职务。几项研究质疑律师在确定未来陪审员是否有偏见方面是否有效，之前的研究表明，死刑审判中的谨慎程序使那些留在陪审团中的陪审员更容易被定罪。对假设检验、行为确认和认知不和谐的基本社会心理学研究可能会为律师是否有能力识别有偏见的陪审员，以及识别偏见的过程是否会对案件中陪审员的决定产生不利影响提供洞察。在预审过程中，有几点律师在试图预测死刑案件中个别陪审员的偏见时可能会被误导。在信息寻求阶段，律师对陪审员的刻板印象或期望可能会影响他们向陪审员提出的问题的类型，包括偏向于证实律师的假设或缺乏诊断性的问题。在信息生成阶段，律师的问题可能会影响从陪审员那里收集的信息，特别是如果陪审员被激励提供社会适当的回应。在推理阶段，律师提出的问题，他们持有的假设，以及他们从陪审员那里得到的答案，可能会偏离律师从陪审员对深思熟虑的问题的反应中得出的结论。最后，支持支持死刑的态度的行为，甚至是通过行为确认过程引起的支持，可能会增加陪审员投票给死刑被告定罪的可能性。PI将进行四项实验研究，以检查有偏见的假设检验和行为确认过程是否影响从陪审员那里获得的信息的质量，律师从陪审团中剔除有偏见的人的能力，以及在死刑可能性危险期间的行为确认是否会导致不和谐的减少行为，从而导致陪审团更容易定罪。这些研究的结果将提供关于预审程序的有价值的信息，以及它可能如何影响从未来的陪审员那里获得的信息的质量以及他们随后作出的决定，提供的信息将有助于制定干预措施，以改善律师指导的预审。这些研究代表着首次尝试超越陪审团选择研究的传统主题，即确定判决的预测因素，以确定影响陪审团选择过程有效性的心理过程。

Voir dire is the legal proceeding during which attorneys and/or judges question prospective jurors for the purpose of uncovering bias that may prevent the defendant from receiving a fair trial; those jurors who are deemed biased may be challenged for cause and excused from jury service. Several studies have questioned whether attorneys are effective at determining whether prospective jurors are biased, and previous research has demonstrated that the voir dire process in capital trials makes those jurors who remain on the jury more conviction prone. Basic social-psychological research on hypothesis-testing, behavioral confirmation, and cognitive dissonance may provide insight into whether attorneys are capable of identifying biased jurors and whether the very process of identifying bias may adversely influence the decisions of the jurors seated in a case. There are several points during the voir dire process at which attorneys may be led astray when trying to predict the bias of individual jurors in capital cases. In the information seeking stage, attorneys' stereotypes or expectations about jurors may influence the types of questions that they ask of jurors, including questions that are biased toward confirming the attorney's hypothesis or that lack diagnosticity. In the information generation stage, attorneys' questions may influence the information gathered from jurors, especially if jurors are motivated to provide socially appropriate responses. In the inferential stage, the questions asked by attorneys, the hypotheses they hold, and the answers they receive from jurors may bias the conclusions that attorneys draw from jurors' responses to voir dire questions. Finally, the very act of endorsing a pro-capital punishment attitude, even an endorsement that is evoked through behavioral confirmation processes, may increase the likelihood that jurors will vote to convict a capital defendant.The PI will conduct four experimental studies to examine whether biased hypothesis testing and behavioral confirmation processes influence the quality of information elicited from jurors, the ability of attorneys to strike biased venirepersons from the jury panel, and whether behavioral confirmation during a capital voir dire may lead to dissonance reduction behavior, resulting in a more conviction prone jury. The results of these studies will provide valuable information about the voir dire process and how it might influence the quality of information obtained from prospective jurors and the subsequent decisions that they render, providing information that will help develop interventions for improving attorney-conducted voir dire. These studies represent a first attempt to move beyond traditional topics in jury selection research, namely identifying predictors of verdict, to identifying psychological processes that influence the efficacy of the jury selection process.