Reaching a Verdict

Stages in decision making

Why is it illegal to carry out research on a real jury? As after all, mock juries just don’t fit the bill do they?

Juries need to be able to come decisions without being concerned for being held accountable. The best mock juries are those that actually do confer in a room together; this is more realistic than Psychology students filling in questionnaires and answering questions.

Let’s think about what happens to the jury when they are in a room together discussing. Do they go through any stages when making a decision?

Hastie et al (1983) believes that they do. He set up mock juries and concluded the following stages.

• Orientation Period -  Open discussion, different opinions, questions asked and facts investigated
• Open confrontation - Pressure on from the majority to make the minority confer, debate, support for group decision
• Reconciliation - conflicts resolved, humour to release any tension

Q - What is the biggest flaw with this study?

• A - Only mock juries were used and they weren’t faced with sending someone to jail so this study lacks ecological validity. A real jury may react differently under such pressure

Majority Influence

How do you react to social pressure?

According to Solomon Asch (1951) a third of people will ignore what they know to be true and go with an untruth if they are in a group that insists that lie to be true.

Consider if you were a participant in a psychology study and you were told to identify three birds of Britain (you are an ornithologist and really know your birds) but in several of the trials that you undergo, most of the other participants are saying that one of the birds is a robin but it is obviously a blackbird. Would you say it was a robin or a blackbird? Perhaps you have it wrong and there is a kind of blackbird that looks like a robin that you didn’t know about...or perhaps you are right and they are all wrong...

In Asch’s experiment, many of the participants didn’t think their answer was correct and they were simply conforming but others actually did think the group was correct...

It could be that when Asch conducted this experiment, people were conforming more and that now they are more individualistic. If you consider a jury and if they take a vote at the very beginning of the discussion as to the guilt or innocence of the defendant, then conformity may occur with the majority.

Today the results could be different and may not be generalised to other countries.

Q - Why do people conform?

• A - People want to fit in with the group which is known as normative influence and they believe that the group knows more than them so this is known as informational influence.

  In the example about the robin and blackbird, if you had considered that the group may know of a blackbird that looks like a robin then you would have fallen prey to informational influence.

Minority Influence

Perhaps you would assert your views, no matter what everyone else in the group said.

Moscovici (1969) conducted a study about minority influence possibly due to his own experienced of being persecuted through being Jewish.

Look at the results below

• All participants were female - TRUE
• The task was ambiguous -  FALSE
• Participants were shown 36 slides of different shades of blue and asked to state the colour of each slide - TRUE
• Participants believe the study was about minority influence - FALSE
• In the first part of the study the confederates were consistent and said green for each slide - TRUE
• In the second part of the experiment, they weren’t consistent and they answered green 24 times and blue 12 times - TRUE
• Participants in the first condition called the disks green in 8.4% of the trials - TRUE
• Participants in the second inconsistent condition called the disks green in 0.3% of the trials - FALSE
• This suggests that minorities can influence majorities - TRUE 
• The minority need to be inconsistent - FALSE
• This shows they are confident - TRUE

There are many problems with this study in that it is artificial and only used women so may not be representative. The sample is also small. It was a lab experiment so lacked ecological validity.

Watching the film ’12 Angry Men’ will give you an insight into unwavering and consistent minority influence.