Doctoral Dissertation Research: Improving the Accuracy of Juror Self-Reports of Bias during Rehabilitative Voir Dire

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The courts have long acknowledged pretrial publicity as a source of juror bias. To safeguard defendants' rights to a fair and impartial jury, the courts frequently attempt to "rehabilitate" jurors who admit bias by asking them if they could set aside their bias and be fair and impartial. Yet research indicates that jurors' self-reports of their ability to be fair and impartial are largely inaccurate. For example, regardless of their level of exposure to pretrial publicity, jurors typically report an ability to be fair and impartial. Therefore, this practice of juror rehabilitation is ineffective. Enhancing self-reporting accuracy is critical given that inaccurate self-reports not only undermine defendants' right to a fair and impartial jury but can also create additional litigation, thus requiring valuable time and resources from the courts and weakening public confidence in the accuracy and legitimacy of the legal system. The present research examines how conformity pressures from the judge and other jurors influence jurors' self-reporting accuracy and tests the effectiveness of a novel intervention designed to increase the accuracy of self-reported bias. This project examines the mechanism behind jurors' inaccurate reports of their ability to be fair and impartial and the effectiveness of juror rehabilitation in two jury simulation experiments. First, this project will test whether the behaviors of the judge, other jurors, or both are influencing jurors' self-reporting accuracy by fostering pressures for them to conform their behavior to the request of the judge and other potential jurors. Second, this research will test the effectiveness of an intervention for decreasing conformity pressures during juror rehabilitation and attenuating the biasing effects of pretrial publicity on jurors' decision making. Research shows that pretrial publicity biases jurors' decision-making in part by creating source monitoring errors wherein jurors confuse evidence learned from pretrial publicity with evidence presented during trial. The proposed intervention allows jurors to reflect on and write down information obtained through pretrial publicity prior to being questioned about their ability to set aside bias and be impartial. This intervention should decrease conformity pressures and source monitoring errors and, in turn, increase self-reporting accuracy. In addition, the proposed research will involve students enrolled at a Hispanic-serving institution as research assistants, contributing to the preparation of students from underrepresented groups for graduate study in the sciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.