Critics of the jury system, or simply those who are nervous about taking part, will sometimes characterize a jury’s result as a kind of crap shoot. The feeling is that they’re inconsistent, and subject to the idiosyncrasies of group influence. “A jury can do anything,” I’ve sometimes heard counsel tell their clients. That is an attitude that can make attorneys and clients less trusting in the deliberation process, and more conservative than they ought to be about going to trial. That fear can sometimes put its thumb on the scale in favor of an unwise settlement.
It is true that every jury carries a risk. No matter how good you think your case is, or how wrong you consider the other side to be, there’s always a chance that a jury will see it differently. But exposure leads to trust. Either in the courtroom and through post-verdict discussions, or by watching the deliberations themselves during a research mock trial, the more you’re able to watch juries in action, the more confidence you’re likely to have in the process. There is also research supporting that intuition. Academics from Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania (Hu, Whiting, & Bernstein, 2021) focused on the question of consistency, and found that group decisions are substantially more consistent than aggregated individual decisions. Because group discussion tends to have a norming effect on individual views — eliminating the less trustworthy extremes — their results have a high degree of consistency. As the researchers concluded, “deliberation is a far more stable process than we expected.”
The Research: Deliberations Lead to More Consistent Results
Prior social science research on the effects of deliberation has been inconclusive, and some believe that the role of social influence might make groups more inconsistent than individuals.To test that, the researchers employed a novel design using 1,403 participants who completed a total of 259 online trials. They provided responses to a number of scenarios, either as individuals or by discussing with a group. When they were with a group, they participated through text exchange using pseudonyms so they would not recognize when the same group was deliberating again on a parallel scenario.
The goal was to measure consistency: Would individuals and would the same jury react consistently to a parallel case? The response was, generally yes. Groups were consistent with prior decisions about 63 percent of the time. Individuals were more consistent when them were members of groups than when they were deciding alone. When researchers aggregated individual decisions, creating “nominal groups” that did not actually meet or deliberate, they were consistent only about 46 percent of the time. “Since nominal groups did not deliberate, these results suggest that deliberation is a key ingredient to decision consistency.” “Mere voting,” the authors continued, “led to randomness.”
The Implications: More Information on What to Trust
The message from this study is that, even as we’re still cautious over unexpected results, perhaps we should trust deliberation a bit more.
Trusting Deliberations in Jury Research
When measuring juror opinion in advance of trial, by conducting a focus group or mock trial for example, the research buttresses the intuition to look at the products of group discussion more than we look at individual opinions, or aggregated individual opinions. I remember when early online jury research, for example, was little more than a survey. Now that the pandemic has convinced more of us that group discussion is actually effective in an online setting, that component should be a part of your project.
Trusting the Jury System
The research also adds support to the idea that those practitioners of early democracy who first thought of the idea of a group deliberating to a common decision were onto the right thing. Groups have a collective intelligence, a greater sensitivity to cognitive and social behaviors, and a way of favoring what is common and isolating what is idiosyncratic or extreme. There’s no guarantee, of course, but groups will be more likely than individuals to arrive at a consistent and reliable decision. And the secret is not just the number of individuals, but the process of discussion. The researchers write, “society’s trust in groups is well founded — but only when they deliberate.”
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Hu, X. E., Whiting, M. E., & Bernstein, M. S. (2021, May). Can Online Juries Make Consistent, Repeatable Decisions?. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-16).
Image credit: 123rf.com, used under license
