Psychological Mechanisms Underlying the Biasing Effects of Voir Dire

Voir dire是一种法律程序，在此过程中，律师和/或法官询问潜在的陪审员，目的是揭露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，之前的研究表明，在死刑审判中，口头审查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让我们深入了解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。在口头陈述过程中，律师在试图预测死刑案件中个别陪审员的偏见时，可能会在几个点上误入歧途。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，包括偏向于证实律师假设或缺乏诊断性的问题。在信息产生阶段，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上适当的回应。在推理阶段，律师提出的问题，他们所持的假设，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口头审查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，即使是通过行为确认过程引起的支持，也可能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，以检验有偏见的假设检验和行为确认过程是否会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，以及在死刑审查期间的行为确认是否会导致减少不和谐的行为，从而使陪审团更容易定罪。这些研究的结果将提供有价值的信息，说明审查程序及其如何影响从准陪审员那里获得的信息的质量和他们随后作出的决定，提供的信息将有助于制定干预措施，以改进律师进行的审查。这些研究代表了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.