Verdict spotting: investigating the effects of juror bias, evidence anchors and verdict system in jurors.

The Scottish verdict of represents a second acquittal verdict which is not legally defined. Existing research into the influence of the verdict on jury decision making is modest. The main aim of the current study was therefore to investigate the influence of verdict systems (two vs three) on juror decision making.

Threshold point utilisation in juror decision-making.

This study aims to identify whether a model of juror decision-making (i.e. the threshold point model) that encompasses both rational and intuitive decision-making exists.

The bastard verdict and its influence on jurors.

The Scottish legal system is a unique jurisdiction, as jurors are able to give not proven verdicts in addition to the well-known Anglo-American verdicts (guilty and not guilty). The not proven verdict has never been legally defined, meaning that currently legal practitioners can only estimate why a not proven verdict has been given. The main aim of this study was to investigate if jurors violate the regularity principle, which is commonly incorporated in many rational choice models, by testing if the introduction of the not proven verdict has an impact on the outcomes given by jurors.

Faith in thy threshold.

The current study focussed on the decision-making processes of jurors. The study investigated how jurors make a decision, if they integrate information within their decision-making process and if cue utilisation thresholds promote confirmation bias. To do this, 108 participants listened to one of nine cases.

Are consistent juror decisions related to fast and frugal decision making? Investigating the relationship between juror consistency, decision speed and cue utilisation.

The aim of this study was to establish whether more consistent/accurate juror decision making is related to faster decision-making processes which use fewer cues - that is, fast and frugal heuristic processes. A correlational design was implemented with the co-variables: consistency of verdict decisions (participant decisions compared to the actual court verdicts), decision speed, and cue utilisation (the number of cues used to make a final verdict decision). Sixty participants read information about six murder trials which were based on real cases and whose outcome verdicts were deemed to be correct by the Scottish legal institution.