The Effects of Perspective Taking and Victim Impact Statement Emotionality on Courtroom Perceptions and Decisions
Karen Ho (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Emily Bendremer (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), & Jeanine L. M. Skorinko (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)
I know you are ready to run this study and don’t have your data yet, but I was wondering what you were currently thinking might be the best next step after this first study?
I think that once we establish an understanding of the individual and combined effects of a victim impact statement emotionality and perspective taking (e.g., in terms of courtroom perceptions, culpability, and favorability), we can look at how the delivery method of a VIS may affect a mock juror (e.g., is it easier for them to take the victim’s perspective if they can put a face to the name? Does an oral testimony illicit more sympathy for the victim or increase the perceived culpability of the defendant?). This will allow us to form a more comprehensive understanding of the manner and extent to which a VIS can affect a courtroom.
What were the trial summaries real? Victim Impact Statements real? How did you decide to use the ones you did?
Mike
Hi Mike! The trial summaries are based on a real case, and the Victim Impact Statements are made up. We chose this case because we wanted something where the victim was harmed, but survived. We also wanted a situation in which the motivation behind the crime wasn’t specifically targeted towards the victim because this may have affected mock jurors’ perception of each individual.
Yes, we were hoping to avoid potentially confounding factors. For example, if we had used an assault case, the mock juror may wonder if the victim had done something to “deserve” the attack (thus decreasing their capacity to feel sympathy for the victim). The mock juror may also wonder if the two had been friends before or what happened for them to reach the point where there were such intense negative feelings. In such a case, (where the motivators may have been personal), the mock juror’s perceptions of the defendant’s personality could have been skewed (e.g., maybe he is a “bad” person at heart if he is willing to physically attack someone he has a relationship with), which could have hindered the mock juror’s ability to sympathize with the defendant.
We also wanted the trial summaries to read as 50/50 in terms of guilty vs not guilty, as we did not want the mock juror’s feelings to be biased based on a clear verdict (e.g., all the evidence is against the defendant, so he must be guilty and therefore he is a “bad” person). With a robbery case, we felt that we were able to control perceptions more easily than with a case that involved personal motivations.
I see there are some posts from last year! How fun! Can you tell us what has changed since you presented last year?
Yes!
We recruited 292 jury-eligible participants through our university research pool and through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (though after some data cleaning fun, we were left with only 224 participants’ data).
In fact, much has happened even since we made our slides! After further data analysis, we found some more interesting results.
Very interesting updated results! Thanks for sharing the changes from before.