Courtroom videos are presented in a variety of ways to jurors, being shown on such devices as small screens in the jury box, big screen television monitors, and large format projection screens. How does the size of video images presented to jurors -- small, medium or large -- influence jurors' decisions? Wendy Heath and Bruce Grannermann (2014) examined the effect of video image size on jurors' verdicts. A total of 263 jury-eligible mock jurors were presented a trial summary about a female defendant charged with murder. For half of the jurors, the trial summary presented strong evidence against the defendant,

Physical attractiveness is one of the most common cues used when people make decisions about everything from employment (hiring, promotions, compensation) to education (grades, attention from teachers) to medicine (attention from doctors, healthiness, trustworthiness) to elections (electoral success)... Nicholas Waterbury (2024) examined the success of physically attractive non-government ("opposition") attorneys arguing against US government attorneys in U.S. federal court. A dataset was created of all orally argued cases at the US Courts of Appeals from 2017 to 2019 in which the US government was a party. The dataset included 1,067 unique cases, 930 unique opposition attorneys representing clients litigating against

Jurors who fail to reserve judgment against a defendant until after they hear the evidence are neither fair nor impartial. A problem for jurors is that the legal presumption of innocence can be at odds with their beliefs, pre-evidence, about the factual innocence of any defendant put on trial. Jurors recognize that criminal defendants are on trial because police officers, prosecutors, and preliminary hearing judges or grand jurors believe them to be guilty. Jurors also gain information in voir dire that can bias them with respect to the factual innocence of a criminal defendant. A key question is whether the

People, including judges and jurors, have a tendency to believe the information they receive. Taking information as true by default is referred to as the truth bias. Sometimes, the information people receive is discredited. When that happens, people are more likely to misremember as true a piece of information they have been told is false, than to misremember as false a piece of information they have been told is true (Pantazi, et al., 2020). Are judges and jurors, as legal fact-finders, able to disregard discredited information? Said differently, are judges and jurors able to set aside their truth bias and

At times, settlement agreements are entered into evidence in jury trials or decision-makers become aware of prior settlement agreements. Are settling defendants perceived as responsible for alleged conduct or is settlement perceived more neutrally as a convenient (less costly, less time-consuming) resolution? Do settlements send different signals than those conveyed by allegations, complaints, verdicts or other case resolutions? Bregant and colleagues (2021) conducted two studies exploring how the lay public views settlement in terms of both the parties' reasons for settling and the defendant's inferred responsibility for the alleged conduct....

It has been argued that jurors often undervalue circumstantial evidence (fingerprints, DNA, etc.) and overvalue direct evidence (eyewitness identifications, confessions), even when the circumstantial evidence is more reliable than the direct evidence (Heller, 2006). A reluctance to impose liability on the basis of circumstantial evidence is referred to as the anti-inference bias. How much does the anti-inference bias affect verdicts in criminal cases? Zamir and colleagues (2017) conducted four experimental studies to test the scope of factfinders' aversion towards circumstantial evidence and found that... Teichman and colleagues (2023) examined the extent of the anti-inference bias in the decision-making of jurors,