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Person perception and jurors' decisions
Author(s) -
Sealy A. P.,
Wain C. M.
Publication year - 1980
Publication title -
british journal of social and clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.479
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8260
pISSN - 0007-1293
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1980.tb00921.x
Subject(s) - verdict , cognitive dissonance , psychology , salience (neuroscience) , social psychology , perception , uncorrelated , consistency (knowledge bases) , cognitive psychology , law , statistics , geometry , mathematics , neuroscience , political science
In an experiment on simulated juries subjects were asked to record their impressions of the major participants in the trial. 134 subjects heard a taped reconstruction of a case of theft, based on the court transcript, 224 subjects heard a case of rape. Their impressions, recorded on an adjectival scale, were factor analysed. There was considerable stability in the factors that emerged across trials and across target figures. One factor only correlated with verdicts in the case of theft, namely seeing the defendant as untrustworthy correlated with convicting him. In the rape case impressions of the defendants were largely uncorrelated with verdict, although impressions of the victim were highly correlated with verdict. The results are interpreted in terms of the simultaneous operation of the principles of consistency, salience and post‐decision dissonance.