Verdicts

The primary goal of this research was to determine if the emergence process of action identification could be applied to the way a person perceives another's actions and therefore predict contrasting judgments of right and wrong. Specifically, subjects read transcripts depicting a crime of either grand theft or murder under an induced high or low level of action identification, followed by one of two closing arguments which summarized the position of either the defense or the prosecution. Judgments of blame were obtained from all subjects. Results suggest that the emergence process is more general than originally conceived and can be applied to person perception. As predicted, compared to high level subjects, low level subjects who read about the crime of grand theft, were more influenced by whatever closing argument they read. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

This thesis is a study of the empirical significance of sentencing information on jury decision-making. A challenge in conducting jury behavior research is that direct observation of jury deliberation is either illegal or impractical. Thus most studies of jury behavior are conducted using archival analysis and mock jury questionnaires. And while we have some information on the issue of jury instruction complexity on jury decision-making, we know very little about the specific role of sentencing information on jury decision-making. My research combines aspects of the jury decision-making literature with the sentencing literature, and thus fills a crucial gap in the literature. While we know much about jury decision-making and much about the process of sentencing--this research directly tested whether these two phenomena are related. Mock trials of 100 participants were used to collect the data for this thesis study. The results provide clear evidence that there is a significant effect on jury decision-making when the jurors are provided with sentencing information.