Trial by Tabloid: Can Implicit Bias Education Reduce Pretrial Publicity Bias?

Abstract

The Western District of Washington recently developed an educational video to reduce jurors’ implicit biases. Little is known regarding the effectiveness of this proposed remedy to address a range of implicit biases. This study tested whether this educational video reduces pretrial publicity (PTP) bias. A total of 330 undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to read PTP or unrelated articles. An average of 9 days later, they were randomly assigned to watch the educational video prior to viewing a murder trial. Those exposed to PTP were more likely to convict and found the defendant more culpable and less credible. The educational video did not reduce PTP bias. A more tailored debiasing strategy may be needed to overcome the biasing effects of PTP. Differences in legal decisions also emerged depending on whether participants completed the second phase in-person or online, which has implications for future data collection modes.

Quality-checking the new normal: trial modality in online jury decision-making research

“…Finally, it would have been ideal to compare online participation to in-person participation, as has been done in previous research (Jones et al, 2022 ; Maeder et al, 2018 ), in order to determine if modality might moderate the effects of data collection type. Future research should probe whether these methodological considerations interact in order to provide jury researchers with a more fulsome sense of best practices.…”

“…These authors observed that while there was no main effect of data collection type, online samples demonstrated increased leniency toward the White defendant as compared to in-person samples, potentially owing to the presence of racialized participants and/or research assistants in the room during in-person data collection. More recently, Jones and colleagues ( 2022 ) demonstrated that data collection type (in-person vs. online) did not exhibit a main effect on verdict in a trial involving pre-trial publicity (PTP). However, data collection type did interact with an implicit bias remedy, such that among participants who completed the study in person, those who were exposed to the remedy were actually more likely to convict the defendant and provided harsher sentences than those who were not (there were no differences as a function of implicit bias remedy in the online conditions).…”