Jurors’ Subjective Experiences of Deliberations: The Tangled Nature of Status Characteristics

• In Event: 432 - Section on Social Psychology Paper Session. Social Psychology in Context: Dimensions of Health, Stress, Danger, and Subjective Experience

Abstract

Do jurors’ subjective experiences of jury deliberations vary by their status characteristics (e.g., gender, race)? The extant literature on jury deliberations considers how objective measures of participation—such as participation rates and jurors’ assessments of each other’s influence—vary by status groups. Yet, little of this work has considered jurors’ assessments of their own experiences. Drawing on a unique survey dataset of over 3,000 real-world jurors, we investigate which jurors felt they had enough time to express their views during deliberations. We find that blacks of lower socioeconomic status and Hispanics are less likely to feel they had enough time to express themselves during deliberations relative to whites. Among blacks, these findings are associated with blacks’ varying attitudes regarding the criminal justice system, suggesting that attitudes matter in understanding how different status groups come away from small group deliberations. Our findings extend the status characteristics literature by calling attention to the importance of subjective assessments of interpersonal interaction. Additionally, we demonstrate the importance of the joint consideration of race and class as well as of the situational context in order to better understand the analytic meaning of status characteristics in observational studies.

Author

• Alix Winter, Harvard University