Investigated the influence of trivial testimonial detail on judgments of 424 undergraduates who served as mock jurors. Ss read a summary of a court case involving robbery and murder. In Experiment 1, detailed testimony influenced judgments of guilt, even when the detail was unrelated to the culprit. In Experiment 2, detailed testimony was especially powerful when an opposing witness testified that she could not remember the trivial details. Subsequent analyses suggest that the impact of detailed testimony on guilt judgments is mediated by inferences about the eyewitnesses. When eyewitnesses provided more detail, they were generally judged to be more credible, to have a better memory for the culprit's face and for details, and to have paid more attention to the culprit. John Dean, former counsel to President Richard Nixon, testified before the Watergate committee of the United States Senate in 1973. Dean's testimony contained details about dozens of meetings and conversations that took place over a period of several years. Some of Dean's testimony was specific and concrete, as, for example, in the following description of a conversation with Robert Haldeman: I felt I should tell Haldeman that I was going to meet with the prosecutors personally so I called him in California on the morning of April 8 before they departed for Washington. I made the call from Mr. Shaffer's office and when I told him this he said that I should not meet with the prosecutors because, as he said, "once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's going to be very hard to get it back in." (Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, 1973, 1010) When Dean first testified, some writers were so impressed by his memory for detail that they called him the "human tape recorder" (Neisser, 1981). This anecdote about John Dean raises several important questions. Does the amount of detail a person provides influence listeners' decisions? If so, why are people impressed by detail? The present research addresses these questions using a jury simulation paradigm. Recent research suggests that people are persuaded by testi-This research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health. The article is based on a master's thesis completed by Brad E. Bell. We thank Robin Ashley, Lavonne Dorsey, Lisa Hopkins, Traci Sammeth, Cynthia Nielson, and Susan Shriener for assistance with the experiments and manuscript preparation. We also thank Robert Josephs for help with this research, and Harriet Shaklee, Kipling Williams, and seven anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

The influence of the degree of detail of eyewitness testimony on two sides of a court case was investigated in two experiments. In the first experiment subject-jurors read a civil court case involving an automobile-pedestrian acadent. The plaintiff and the defendant presented conflicting eyewitness accounts. Judgments of the relative =edibility of the eyewitnesses on each side and the percentage of negligence of the parties were influenced by the relative degree of detail of the eyewitness testimony on each side. In the second experiment subject-jurors read a criminal court case involving robbery and murder. The prosecution and defense presented conflicting eyewitness accounts.

When witnesses at a trial offer testimony that is vivid, it may be more persuasive than the same testimony offered in a pallid manner. In this paper we elucidate three categories of variables (inferential, attentional/memorial, and affective) that are likely to mediate the effects of the vividness of testimony on jury judgments. These variables are then used to explain discrepant findings among mock juror experiments investigating vividness effects. Finally, we discuss the implications of vividness effects for the legal system.

Perceivers' evaluations of attributions of causality, moral responsibility, and blame were investigated in this study. Participants read 2 scenarios with either mild or severe consequences, and then rated the perpetrators on either causality, moral responsibility, or blame. Participants subsequently rated the attributions on several evaluative dimensions. Attributions of moral responsibility were generally judged by perceivers to be more complex than attributions of causality and blame, suggesting that the process of attributing of blame may not involve the subprocess of evaluating moral responsibility. Excuses were not consistently judged to be more important for any particular type of attribution.

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