Implicit and Explicit Attitudes Toward Prosecutors and Defense Attorneys

Abstract

Research consistently finds that jurors bring preexisting attitudes and opinions, which can influence trial outcomes, into the courtroom. This research seeks to understand if juror decision-making is influenced by implicit and explicit perceptions of legal actor trustworthiness. Participants were recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk online platform and were randomly assigned to read a summarized trial scenario and render a guilty or not guilty verdict. Two of the three trials differed according to presentation of “compromising” evidence by either the prosecution or the defense, with the third serving as a control condition. To establish if participants had trustworthy or untrustworthy implicit attitudes toward prosecutors or defense attorneys, participants completed an Implicit Association Test (IAT). Participants then reported their explicit attitudes toward prosecutors and defense attorneys, in addition to providing their demographic information and attitudes toward the criminal legal system. Results indicate that implicit and explicit biases, as well as certain socio-demographics, are associated with verdicts in the trial scenarios. However, in particularly ambiguous cases (control condition), preexisting implicit biases of legal actor trustworthiness appear to inform verdicts more than explicit attitudes. These results suggest that attorney reliance on explicit attitudes during voir dire may be more informative, except in cases in which the evidence for both the prosecution and defense is particularly ambiguous.