Research on juror and jury decision-making has proliferated over the past 45 years since the publication of the classic monograph, The American jury (Kalven & Zeisel, 1966). Although the scholarship on juries is clearly characterized by quantity, some have expressed concerns over the variability of the quality of research generated in this area. The proposed conference will bring together leaders and emerging leaders in the field of jury research for a conversation about the future of jury research. Participants will come from a variety of disciplines, including law, psychology, sociology, economics, and criminology. This interdisciplinary group will address important questions that remain unresolved in the area, identify new questions of theoretical and practical importance, assess the contributions of theoretical models of individual and group decision making, evaluate methodological variance across studies and paradigms, and discuss the challenges to ecological validity in current and future research efforts.
Improving the quality of research on jury behavior has the potential to increase the impact of the research on legal practice and decisions, as well as improve the justice received by plaintiffs, complainants, and defendants participating in jury trials. In addition, the discussions of interesting and important research questions and debates about appropriate methodologies could impact graduate training in law and social science, influencing the quality of work produced by the next generation of scholars. The conference will be held at a Hispanic Serving Institution and we will provide opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students to attend the conference and benefit from the discussions.
Although there is clearly an abundance of scholarship examining jury decision making and behavior, some scholars (as well as reviewers and editors of journals and program officers of federal funding agencies) have complained about the variability in the quality of this research. To address these concerns, more than two dozen leading jury scholars convened at John Jay College-CUNY in the fall of 2012 for an NSF-funded conference on the Future of Jury Research. The conference proceedings were videotaped and are available at www.margaretkovera.com/research/conference-on-the-future-of-jury-research/. At the conference, subject matter experts discussed issues facing jury scholars and made a number of recommendations for improving the quality of jury research. These issues centered on the following three topics: Identifying important research questions. What makes a research question on jury behavior important and worthy of study? Panelists made several recommendations for formulating important research questions, including designing studies that 1) test whether behavioral assumptions in the law are accurate, 2) evaluate the effectiveness of proposed jury reforms, 3) provide information about how litigators can more effectively try cases, 4) examine the effects of race, ethnicity, and culture, and 5) evaluate the quality of decisions made by the new types of legal decision making bodies that are being introduced in other countries. Advantages and disadvantages of different methods for studying jury behavior. Some jury scholars criticize the work of others on the grounds that the methods lack ecological validity (i.e, they do not faithfully represent what jurors actually do, see or hear—also known as mundane realism), concluding that the results from an experiment with low mundane realism must not generalize to the real world. Is that inference necessarily true? Researchers discussed preferences for mundane realism versus experimental control, concluding that often decisions about whether which was more important depended upon the research question being tested. Integrating models of individual juror decision-making with models of group behavior. In the past decade, researchers have focused on identifying models of individual juror behavior that describe how they evaluate and integrate evidence and have relatively neglected that jurors make decisions in the context of a larger group. Do the current models of individual juror decision making provide us with a "good enough" understanding of how individual verdict preferences translate to a group verdict? Although one panelist argued that individual juror decisions predict group jury behavior, others argued that group processes influence which pieces of evidence are remembered by jurors, which in turn affects the decisions that they make. Other panelists argued that our understanding of jury behavior is incomplete until we integrate models of individual juror decision making with models of group decision making. The results of the conference have the potential to have broader impact on society through improving the quality of jury scholarship. The participants in the conference described how to evaluate the importance of research questions about the jury, suggested avenues for new areas of research that may prove fruitful, and debated the relative merits of different methods for studying juror and jury behavior (e.g., observation, survey/interviews, simulation) depending upon the questions that are being asked. Jury researchers already are referencing the output of the conference in manuscripts submitted for publication and reviews that are submitted at the journals in the field. The discussions of interesting and important research questions and debates about appropriate methodologies could impact graduate training in law and social science, influencing the quality of work produced by the next generation of scholars. Improving the quality of research on jury behavior has the potential to increase the impact of the research on legal practice and decisions, as well as to improve the justice received by plaintiffs, complainants, and defendants participating in jury trials.
