Prototypes in the courtroom: Lay representations of legal concepts.

Abstract

To select a verdict, jurors must integrate the evidence presented at trial with the law presented in the judge's instructions. Jurors are assumed to have no prior knowledge of the law or to set aside that knowledge after instruction. Several experiments (N = 489) tested these assumptions and revealed that (a) uninstructed Ss had built naive representations of crime categories that included legally incorrect information; (b) these representations contained category prototypes that influenced Ss' verdict choices; and (c) Ss' reliance on prototype information for verdict selection was resistant to change by instruction. Thus, Ss had prior knowledge of the law and did not set it aside after hearing the judge's instructions. This suggests that instructions must do more than create legal concepts where none exist; to be effective, instructions must revise jurors' existing concepts. A juror's task is to integrate the evidence presented at trial with the decision criteria defined by the law to select a legally appropriate verdict. Because most jurors have not had formal training in legal decision making (American Bar Association, 1968), the judge must instruct the jurors on the law at the time of trial. In a criminal trial, these instructions cover three types of law: (a) procedural law, including how to assess witness credibility and how to evaluate different kinds of evidence; (b) the requirements of proof, which explain that the defendant is innocent until the State proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty; and (c) the substantive law, including definitions of the crimes charged (e.g., murder, robbery, and assault) and any defenses proposed (e.g., self-defense). For each crime, the law specifies a set of features that are singly necessary and jointly sufficient for guilt. Burglary, for example, requires that (a) the defendant knowingly entered a building, (b) the defendant did so without authority, and (c) the defendant did so with the intent to commit a crime (American Law Institute, 1962). Each of these criteria is a necessary condition for guilt; in other words, if any one of these conditions is not met beyond a reasonable doubt, then the juror is supposed to vote not guilty. These features are also jointly sufficient for guilt; if I would like to thank Sheri Springs-Phillips for her assistance with this research. She was an undergraduate honoris student in the Department of Psychology who collected most of the data for these studies and helped to write some of the crime situations used as stimuli. Her participation in this research is gratefully acknowledged. I would also like to thank Cathleen Milos.ChinazoOpia, and Scott Cho for collecting part of the data for Experiment 3.1 am grateful to Gene Borgida, Phoebe Ellsworth, Saul Kassin, Regina Schuller, and several reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Gender differences in attitudes toward psychopathic sexual offenders

“…The idea that jurors-rather than being blank slates-have idiosyncratic knowledge, stereotypes, and prototypes to guide their decision-making for legal tasks has a substantial theoretical and empirical foundation (see, e.g., Finkel, 1995;Smith, 1991Smith, , 1993Smith & Studebaker, 1996;Stalans, 1993;Stalans & Diamond, 1990). For example, in an investigation of jurors' prototypes of insanity, Skeem and Golding (2001) demonstrated that jurors' interpretations of case information as well as the verdicts they rendered were influenced by the prototype of insanity to which they subscribed.…”

Evidence coverage and argument skills: cognitive factors in a juror's verdict choice

“…Rather, it provides a sound, general depiction of the process of juror decision making and story construction. This and other studies (Kuhn et al, 1994;Smith, 1991Smith, , 1993Weinstock & Cronin, 2003), however, suggest that accounts of juror decision making must consider differences not only in representations people hold, but in the cognitive ability and understanding of the means of constructing and justifying knowledge claims that mediate the representational process. As the thinking underlying juror argument skill may be amenable to improvement (Baron, 1985(Baron, , 1993Kuhn, 1999aKuhn, , 2001Stanovich, 1999), understanding jurors' reasoning should lead to optimizing it.…”

Twelve Certain Men: The Impact of Emotional Appraisals on Juror Decision-Making

“…These earlier studies typically found that people who had been induced to feel traditionally negatively valenced emotions would be predisposed towards a more systematic style of processing, while those people who were induced to feel positively valenced emotions favored the use of more heuristic styles of processing (Bless, Bohner, Schwarz & Strack, 1990;Mackie & Worth, 1989;1991).…”

“…These valence-oriented studies proposed different mechanisms of action for their findings including capacity arguments (that a state of cognitive overload results from the fact that positive emotions are intricately intertwined with other conceptual notes; Mackie & Worth, 1989;1991) and motivational bases (in order to maintain or achieve positive states by avoiding or remedying negative states, we must utilize systematic thought processes; Bless et al, 1990;Wegener & Petty, 1994;Wegener, Petty, & S. M. Smith, 1995). Bless et al (1996) modified the notion that happiness lessens the motivation to deeply process information.…”

“…Utilizing heuristic processing during trial proceedings could invoke the representativeness heuristic (assessments of eyewitness credibility as illustrated by the "taxicab problem" of Kahneman & Tversky 1973;Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), the availability heuristic (decision-makers inappropriately considering personal anecdotal experiences as dispositive of larger overall trends and tendencies; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), egocentric and optimistic biases (erroneously evaluating likelihood of harm, risk calculations, reasonableness and forseeability of outcomes as they relate to both oneself and others, which is of particular concern when considering negligence claims; Weinstein, 1980;Ross & Sicoly, 1979), hindsight bias (believing the known outcome to be more likely than it really was simply based on the fact that it occurred; Kamin & Rachlinski, 1995;Sanchirico, 2003), outcome bias (distorted evaluation of the quality of a decision given the known outcome; Baron & Hershey, 1988), counterfactual thinking (constructing alternate courses of action that could have had different outcomes for the events which led to the trial; Wiener et al 1994), and other types of cognitive tendencies contrary to the economist's view of human beings as dispassionate, rational actors. Other examples include the use of technically incorrect lay definitions of legal rules when determining verdicts as well as the comparison of case facts to "crime prototypes" which are each juror's idealized, generic expectation of what the crime typically involves (V. L. Smith, 1991). Jurors are also vulnerable to less cognition-oriented heuristics such as placing undue emphasis on the complexity of the testimony given by experts or people perceived to be in positions of authority (Cooper, Bennett, & Sukel, 1996), the physical attractiveness of the defendant (Lieberman, 2002), the sheer number of plaintiffs (Horowitz & Bordens, 2000), and the volume of evidence entered (Weinstock & Flaton, 2004).…”