Risk Management and Juries: How Jurors React to Cost-Benefit Analyses

Cuny John Jay College Of Criminal Justice, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

When making a decision whether a company was negligent and therefore liable for harm to the plaintiff, juries are frequently asked to second-guess people's and companies' decisions. The goal of such a legal system is to compensate the plaintiff for harm caused by another's wrongdoing or negligent behavior. Many psychological and other researchers have investigated the workings of the civil jury system, and frequently claim that its purposes are not being fulfilled. However, this research has usually focused on a limited number of independent variables or attitudinal variables at one time. In contrast, the first goal of this proposal is to incorporate a variety of independent variables, moderating and mediating variables, and jurors' attitudes and perceptions into a comprehensive model of civil jury decision making. Also, the law of negligence (and to a lesser degree the law of product liability) has integrated cost-benefit analyses into the determination of whether a defendant should be held liable. Although the concept of a cost-benefit analysis is so incorporated into the law, how jurors perform cost-benefit analyses or how jurors respond to defendants who perform such analyses has not received much attention. The second goal of this proposal is to investigate variables associated with the claim that a defendant's performance of a cost-benefit analysis actually outrages jurors and leads to pro-plaintiff outcomes. This project uses products liability cases in which a cost-benefit analysis is or is not performed as a background for building a comprehensive model of civil jury decision making. Such cases include elements relevant to many variables that have been previously investigated as relevant to jury decision making, but which have been investigated usually in isolation. The elements of such cases include the risk involved with the product, the defendant's behavior in face of such a risk, jurors' attitudes and perceptions of the case, and jurors' outrage. This project will analyze the data from the proposed studies as a path model that includes the variables mentioned, and others. The independent variables in the studies will investigate what elements of the model are related to jurors' outrage toward cost-benefit analyses, and how that outrage might be mitigated.