Psychological Mechanisms Underlying the Biasing Effects of Voir Dire

Cuny John Jay College Of Criminal Justice, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

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.