Stereotypical and counterstereotypical defendants: Who is he and what was the ase against her?

Abstract

Three studies investigated the effects of stereotype congruence on juror decision making by focusing on how defendant gender affects the way in which jurors attend to aspects of the case. Due to the female defendant's incongruence with offender stereotypes, mock jurors may direct greater attention to encoding features of the defendant at the expense of carefully considering the evidence. Study 1 (N = 101) found that mock jurors took into account the strength of the evidence against male (stereotypical), but not female (counterstereotypical) defendants. Consistent with this, Study 2 (N = 144) demonstrated that mock jurors were less able to recall facts of the case, but better able to recall details of the defendant, when the defendant was female rather than male. The third and final study (A/ = 113) found that participants spent longer looking at a female defendant than they did looking at a male defendant in a video simulation of a mock trial. Results are discussed in light of the encoding-flexibility explanation of the influence of stereotypes.