In civil cases, potential jurors often express concerns about plaintiffs' motives, corporate defendants, non-economic damages, the burden of proof, lawsuits, and the like. Judges often ask rehabilitative questions to jurors expressing these concerns about their ability to set aside their opinions and base their decision on only the evidence and the law in the case. Salerno and colleagues (2020) tested the effectiveness of judicial rehabilitation in debiasing potential jurors in three separate mock trial experiments based on actual civil cases litigated in an American court involving insurance bad faith, medical malpractice for an aortic rupture misdiagnosis, and medical malpractice for

Jurors in criminal cases are instructed to find guilt when proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Jurors also are provided imprecise definitions of what constitutes reasonable doubt: an actual and substantial doubt, an abiding conviction, being firmly convinced, being morally certain, not wavering or vacillating, having no real doubt, causing a careful person to hesitate, and (tautologically) a doubt that is reasonable. Due to the imprecise nature of the reasonable doubt standard, the certainty jurors require of themselves to find guilt varies across jurors, cases and defendants. Conklin (2020) studied the certainty individual jurors feel is minimally necessary to find guilt

Jurors sometimes withhold information during voir dire. In 1994, a prospective juror refused to answer several items on her juror questionnaire, maintaining that questions about her income, religion, television and reading habits, political affiliations, and health were "very private" and irrelevant. She was cited for contempt, which a federal magistrate judge later overturned (, 891 F. Supp., 552 (E.D. Tex., 1995)). Rose (2001) investigated questions potential jurors are asked in voir dire that they feel are either unnecessary or too private...

The American Bar Association reports that fewer than 10% of attorneys are minorities, with African Americans at 3.9%, Hispanics at 3.3%, and Asian Americans at less than 1%. The rate of entry into the legal profession for African Americans has slowed, and Asians are now the fastest growing minority entering the legal profession (Chambliss, 2004). Minority attorneys face jurors' biases. Cohen and Peterson...

Jurors with higher occupational statuses, higher levels of education, and higher incomes have higher social status. Social status disparities affect our communication activities and social behaviors, including jurors' behavior on juries. York (2006) interviewed jurors post-verdict...

Our reactions to events are determined not only by what actually happened, but also by what might have happened. Jurors think about what might have happened using "if only" statements: if only a driver had been going slower, if only a worker had been wearing goggles, if only the warning label had said so, if only a company had investigated the complaint. These "if only" thoughts are called counterfactual thinking. Sometimes it is easy for jurors to engage in counterfactual thinking and imagine events occurring otherwise, and sometimes it is hard to do so. The ease with which jurors can

Jurors prefer that witnesses speak in jurors' predominant language. Witnesses who testify in a foreign language are often perceived to be less credible than witnesses who testify in English. Do jurors who speak the language of a non-English speaking witness also judge that non-English speaking witness to be less credible? Hosch and colleagues (1996) explored jurors' verdicts...

Parties have a right to the judgment of jurors unclouded by bias, prejudice, or a fixed or preconceived opinion. Juror questionnaires are often opposed because they are argued to cause delay or are deemed unnecessary to identify bias. Flores (2011) compared potential jurors' disclosure of biases in oral voir dire to what they were willing to disclose on written juror questionnaires...

Juries are becoming increasingly ethnically diverse in the United States. How much do non-Caucasian jurors participate in deliberations in comparison to White jurors, and does participation depend on how many minorities are on a jury? Cornwell and Hans (2009) studied the participation levels of 2,306 actual criminal jurors who served on 311 juries in Los Angeles, Phoenix, New York and Washington, D.C....

In the 1950s, Strodtbeck and colleagues (1956, 1957) conducted realistic mock jury research, using mock jurors chosen from the jury rolls, to determine which jurors talked most during deliberations. Jurors' participation levels varied widely, with jury deliberations typically dominated by only a few jurors. On average, three jurors accounted for more than 80% of the total speaking acts in jury deliberations, and most often these dominant jurors were upper-class men. In 1983, Hastie and colleagues also conducted mock jury research, and reported that male jurors initiated about 40% more comments than female jurors. In 2006, in an important study...