Psychological Mechanisms Underlying the Biasing Effects of Voir Dire

Voir dire是一种法律的程序，在此过程中，律师和/或法官对未来的陪审员进行质询，以发现可能妨碍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原因而受到质疑并被免除陪审员职务。 有几项研究质疑律师是否能有效地确定未来的陪审员是否有偏见，以前的研究表明，死刑审判中的预备陪审员程序使那些留在陪审团的陪审员更容易被定罪。 关于假设检验、行为确认和认知失调的基本社会心理学研究可以提供关于律师是否能够识别有偏见的陪审员以及识别偏见的过程是否会对陪审员在案件中的决定产生不利影响的见解。在预备讯问过程中，律师在试图预测死刑案件中个别陪审员的偏见时，有几个点可能会被引入歧途。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类型，包括偏向于确认律师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到的信息，特别是如果陪审员有动机提供社会适当的反应。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使律师从陪审员对预备讯问问题的回答中得出的结论产生偏差。最后，支持死刑态度的行为本身，甚至是通过行为确认过程引起的支持，都可能增加陪审员投票判定死刑被告有罪的可能性。PI将进行四项实验研究，以检验有偏见的假设检验和行为确认过程是否会影响陪审员得出的信息质量，律师将有偏见的陪审员从陪审团中剔除的能力，以及在死刑预备讯问期间的行为确认是否会导致不和谐行为的减少，从而导致陪审团更倾向于定罪。 这些研究的结果将提供有价值的信息，关于预先审查过程，以及它如何可能影响从未来的陪审员那里获得的信息的质量和他们随后做出的决定，提供信息，这将有助于制定干预措施，以改善律师进行的预先审查。这些研究代表了第一次尝试超越传统的主题，在陪审团选择研究，即确定预测的裁决，以确定心理过程，影响陪审团选择过程的效率。

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.