Jury decision-making has long been a focus for legal scholars and behavioral scientists. Juries hold significant power: their verdicts determine a person's freedom, liability, or even life. The Constitution of the United States of America embodies the principles of liberty and justice and, through its first ten Amendments, guarantees civil rights and liberties to the individual. The Sixth Amendment guarantees…
This review draws on empirical, theoretical, and policy literature across psychology, law, sociology, political science, and communication. The foundational literature was identified through established reviews and meta-analyses, particularly Devine (2012), Devine et al. (2001), and Bornstein and Greene (2011, 2017), and supplemented by systematic searches of Law and Human Behavior, the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Psychology, Public Policy, and…
Modern empirical research on jury decision-making generally traces to the Chicago Jury Project of the 1950s, one of the earliest systematic efforts to study juries in operation using social scientific methods (Devine et al., 2001, p. 622). Funded in part by the Ford Foundation, the project marked a decisive shift away from purely doctrinal, anecdotal, or impressionistic accounts of jury…
Researchers examining legal decision-making use a diverse yet sometimes overlapping vocabulary that varies across disciplines and research traditions. Terms such as juror, jury, mock jury, and deliberation are often operationalized differently depending on whether scholars are studying actual court processes, experimental simulations, or theoretical models. The jury pool refers to the broad group of individuals drawn from sources such as…
Following the field's early development in the 1960s, jury research became relatively dormant until a resurgence in the 1970s. During the late 1970s and 1980s, researchers increasingly relied on controlled trial simulations, which allowed investigators to examine causal mechanisms with greater precision and, importantly, to observe deliberation processes that could no longer be observed in real juries (Devine et al.,…