Collaborative Research: Memory and Jury Deliberation: The Benefits and Cost of Collective Remembering

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Juries are the bedrock of the American judicial system. Six or twelve people join together in a collaborative effort to arrive at a verdict. During deliberation, jurors must not only come to a verdict based on the evidence presented during the trial, but they must also remember the evidence. To a large extent, jurors must rely on their own memory. Here, the assumption of the Courts is that the collective memory of a jury is likely to lead to a better, more complete recollection than any individual effort. The difficulty with this position is that there is burgeoning psychological evidence indicating that groups often remember less than the sum of what individuals are capable of remembering. Moreover, extant research demonstrates that what one person says in a conversation can alter the memory of other participants - by imposing misleading information or inducing forgetting, for example. Although both types of conversational effects can affect subsequent decision-making, it is possible that, even more critically, both types can be mitigated in certain circumstances. To this end, the present research explores the way jury deliberation might reshape the memories jurors have of the evidence presented during the trial, the effect any change in memory might have on the verdict of the jury, and the means of mitigating these deliberation effects. The research involves seven experiments employing a mock jury methodology. They will examine whether (1) research concerning collaborative remembering applies to jury deliberations; (2) the emergent consensus story of a jury reflects the conversational dynamics consistent with what is known about conversational remembering; (3) the verdict of a jury can be traced to these conversational influences on memory; (4) the conversational influences on memory are a function of the composition of the jury; and (5) ways exist to mitigate these potentially negative conversational effects through instruction or use of mnemonic technology.