Moral foundations and juror verdict justifications

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to examine the ways in which mock jurors justified their verdict decisions using moral foundations language. Participants read a trial transcript describing a second-degree murder charge featuring an automatism plea (which negates the physical volition of a crime). They then provided a two-to-three sentence rationale for their verdict choice, which we coded for the contextually-valid presence of words from the Moral Foundations (MF) Dictionary. Mock jurors were most likely to use harm-related language in justifying murder votes. A qualitative description also revealed differences in the content of the justifications.

KEYWORDS:

• Juror decision-making
• moral foundations theory
• verdict justification
• linguistic inquiry and word count

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2023.2169101.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2023.2169101.

Notes

1. Automatism is a complicated area of law, with the distinction between insane and non-insane automatism, the overall admissibility of the defense, and the requirement for internal or external causes of involuntariness varying by jurisdiction. For further reading, see the 2015 special issue of Medicine, Science and the Law (Vol. 55, issue 3).

2. Portions of these data (i.e., participants’ verdict decisions) appeared in Maeder and Yamamoto (2015), who reported a substantial number of manipulation check failures associated with the cultural defense manipulation (i.e., several participants in the control condition mistakenly recalled a cultural argument, possibly having imputed one based on the defendant’s Japanese surname – conversely, almost no participants in the cultural argument condition reported that this argument was not made).

3. These manipulations were tested in Maeder and Yamamoto’s (2015) paper examining the influence of defendant gender and ethnocentrism on juror decision-making.

4. Implications for this decision are explored in the Discussion section.

5. https://osf.io/yab2w.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [430].

Notes on contributors

Susan Yamamoto

Susan Yamamoto is an assistant professor in psychology at Campion College at the University of Regina.

Evelyn M Maeder

Evelyn Maeder is a professor in the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Carleton University.

Lin Bailey

Lin Bailey is a research assistant in the Legal Decision-Making Lab in the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Carleton University.