Which of the following two statements best reflects your attitudes? (1) People's misfortunes result from the mistakes they make. (2) Many of the unhappy things in people's lives are partly due to bad luck. Jurors who choose #1 are more likely to have an internal locus of control. Jurors with an internal locus of control believe...

Genove and Imwinkelried (1995) report that white-collar workers award lower damages than blue-collar workers for emotional injuries, but this pattern is reversed for physical injuries. Goodman and colleagues (1990) found that...

Social class affects how jurors understand evidence. For example, social class affects whether jurors believe a criminal defendant is carrying a knife as a weapon intended to injure another person, or carrying it out of habit or for general protection. Pennington and Hastie (1990) report how a juror's social class affects which interpretation is accepted for why a defendant...

Sometimes defendants are tried simultaneously for multiple crimes. Tanford (Tanford, 1985; Tanford and Penrod, 1984) studied the effects of trying a defendant on three charges in one trial, or trying the defendant separately on each charge...

ForsterLee and colleagues (1993) examined how substantive pretrial instructions about compensatory damage awards affected jurors in a toxic tort case. Some jurors were pre-instructed and post-instructed as to compensatory awards, while other jurors were only post-instructed prior to deliberations. The timing of the instructions affected both the amount of compensation awarded and in jurors' differentiation among plaintiffs...

Voir dire is typically conducted in public in groups, and potential jurors often are asked questions most people do not like answering in private and when alone. Post-trial interviews with jurors reveal that jurors often fail to answer fully or truthfully...

At times, defendants admit committing a crime, but argue that they should not be considered legally responsible because they have an excuse. Some excuses are more compelling than others, and some jurors are more compelled by the excuses than others. Heath and colleagues (2001) compared excuses...

When deciding to have a civil case resolved through arbitration, a bench trial, or a jury trial, a common concern focuses on damages the decision-maker might award. The perspective of judges and lawyers is often thought to be different than that of lay citizens. Robbennolt (2002) compared jurors' awards of punitive damages with those of trial judges...

While the opening statement is not considered by the courts to be evidence, opening statements can be highly influential in jurors' decisions...

Jurors who are authoritarian have a desire for order and well-defined rules, conform to conventional norms, and exhibit a desire to punish individuals who deviate from those norms. Authoritarians are often hostile to "out-group" members which, historically in the U.S., has included Jews, communists, sexual offenders, members of the women's movement, and many other easily identified groups. Authoritarian jurors often favor...