Inadmissible Testimony, Instructions to Disregard, and the Jury: Substantive Versus Procedural Considerations

1997-10-01articlePersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin103 citationsclosed

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

Jury Decision Making Processes Legal processes and jurisprudence Deception detection and forensic psychology

Abstract

The present study tested the hypothesis that jurors comply selectively with instructions to disregard inadmissible evidence. A total of 81 mock jurors read a murder trial summary in which a wiretap was ruled admissible, inadmissible because it was not reliable, or inadmissible because it was illegally obtained (there was also a no-wiretap control group). As predicted, participants were more likely to vote guilty and interpret subsequent evidence as more incriminating in the admissible and inadmissible/due-process conditions than in the admissible/unreliable and control groups. These results suggest that jurors are influenced not by the judge's ruling per se but by the causal basis for that ruling. Conceptual and practical implications are discussed.

Citations in this library

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 103 citations exist upstream.

References

1968A Theory of Psychological Reactance

1994Ironic processes of mental control.

1968A Theory of Psychological Reactance

1983A hypothesis-confirming bias in labeling effects.

1968The Limits of the Criminal Sanction

1969The Limits of the Criminal Sanction

1992Explaining the evidence: Tests of the Story Model for juror decision making.

1971The American Jury

Cited by

1997The Flexible Correction Model: The Role of Naive Theories of Bias in Bias Correction

1997Coerced confessions and the jury: An experimental test of the "harmless error" rule.

2013Do confessions taint perceptions of handwriting evidence? An empirical test of the forensic confirmation bias.

2000Understanding the limits of limiting instructions: Social psychological explanations for the failures of instructions to disregard pretrial publicity and other inadmissible evidence.

2003Determining damages: The psychology of jury awards.

2004Understanding Pretrial Publicity: Predecisional Distortion of Evidence by Mock Jurors.

2007Race and the decision making of juries

2009Jury decision‐making biases and methods to counter them