Jury Psychology and Decision Criticism Essay

Introduction

A person spends most of his life in collective entities of various kinds: family, school, organization, or other institutions. Moreover, these institutions can be considered as an organized unity, structuring and, at the same time, limiting the space of human existence. Each person has universal properties that reveal their creative potential and qualities determined by their inclusion in a particular system. At the same time, some qualities secure their membership in the system, while others oppose it and contribute to going beyond its limits.

Main Body

However, society has its laws and is not always focused on the interests of a particular person. As a result, there can be conflicts between society and a person. A person is born as an individual, but from the very first moments of his life, a human cub is included in the system of social relationships and processes and acquires a special quality – he becomes a person. Thus, “personality” is a category denoting a person as a carrier of specific social properties, as a product of social interactions.

Therefore, conflicts between society and the individual are a frequent phenomenon. For his part, as a separate individual, the editor may be right in being critical (Boginskaya, 2020). However, the jurors who made the decisions represent a separate society with a collective response. Moral consciousness is a deliberately assimilated and internally accepted system of principles, norms, and rules of moral activity and behavior that regulates people’s relationship to each other and society. Moral consciousness, formed mainly through moral education, is expressed in the form of moral concepts, judgments, and conclusions about conscience, shame, sin, good and evil, love and fidelity.

The main difference between a jury trial and other forms of legal proceedings is that the decision on the guilt or innocence of the defendant is made in it by a panel of non-professional judges. Among the jurors chosen, the candidates generally do not have a law degree. The distribution of responsibility between the judge and the jury for the delivered verdict is based on the following ideas. The purpose of the trial is not to fight crime or quickly and thoroughly solve crimes. It is focused not on the inevitability of responsibility and non-legal education but on a fair decision and the solution to the issue of human destiny.

In terms of applicable theories, in this case, with a jury, the theory of groupthink can be considered. Groupthink occurs when people are deeply involved in the activities of a cohesive group. In this case, members’ aspirations for unanimity outweigh their motivation to be realistic about alternative courses of action (Strathie et al., 2015). When a team functions in a groupthink mode, there is no room for discussion or alternative points of view. There will be a link to a particular point of view, and warning signs or conflicting data will be discarded. Symptoms such as self-censorship and the illusion of unanimity can be one of the main reasons for making a decision (Strathie et al., 2015). Furthermore, the illusion of invulnerability, the belief in the innate morality of the group, can put some pressure on the jury, resulting in the wrong conclusion.

The theory of pluralistic ignorance on the part of witnesses may apply to the case. The phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance is a situation in social psychology in which the majority of the members of a group reject a norm without expressing it openly (Strathie et al., 2015). However, they incorrectly assume that most of the other members of the group support her and therefore support her as well. Multiple ignorances may explain the bystander effect in emergencies and in court. If none of those present act, then the bystanders assume that others consider the intervention wrong and thus persuade themselves to refuse to help the victims. Additionally, resources provide insight into an individual’s conflict with a group of individuals, which can lead to emotional outbursts and unfair criticism.

The main theoretical position on which the psychological study of decision-making by jurors is based is the path to the study of human behavior as a process of information processing. Supporters of the cognitive approach believe that a person receives information from the external environment, which, being processed by him, serves as the basis of his actions. Under this theory, the jury decision-making process can be described as follows. Litigation is a stimulus that is processed by the jury, as a result of which they perform an act of behaviour and reach a verdict.

Separate components of this incentive are the stages of the trial, at which the jurors receive information about the main evidence, including the testimony of witnesses and physical evidence. Moreover, they hear the parting word of the judge, the opening speeches of the lawyer and the prosecutor, as well as the debate with their participation. In this regard, the psychology of jury decision-making is multifaceted and focuses on individual perceptions combined into a common decision.

Moreover, in the case of sharp criticism of the author, one can say that individuality is a relatively late product of human history. Both the development of mankind as a whole and individual development are equally responsible for the formation of the individual. Nevertheless, in both cases, in the first place, individual (biological) properties manifest themselves and make themselves felt in the form of elementary needs for maintaining life. Further, the development of a person leads to the stage at which the natural specificity is supplemented by the social one – the individual becomes a personality. However, jurors are in an artificially created society and are guided by the opinions of each other. Thus, when outweighing the majority of the captain’s innocence, the other members could natively agree with the majority.

The process of socialization of each individual can be described as an entry into the field of human culture. Their access to this world relies primarily on mastering the language and mastering the forms of contact with other people and ways of dealing with environmental objects developed by the experience of previous generations (Strathie et al., 2015). Introduction to culture is a type of socialization in which young people absorb the culture of the society in all its diversity directly, directly through their own perception. However, the richness of culture is multifaceted, and no one can fully perceive it. Each individual is capable of mastering only some small part of the culture. Thus, it may affect the decision of jurors from different cultural backgrounds. They are guided not only by their opinion but considering the opinion of each other and the majority.

However, it is important to note that the author criticizes the finished product of the trial, not knowing all the subtleties that took place during the proceeding. He considered the situation from a personal point of view, not being able to be on a jury (Cullen and Monds, 2020). The main forms of human behavior, including submission, anarchism and a tendency to individualism, are formed during puberty. At the same time, upon reaching the age of majority in the individual, the formation of the individual-normative system of the individual is completed.

Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that the author of the article expresses his position critically and emotionally. Theoretically, conflicts can be regarded from an emotional and rational point of view (Boginskaya, 2020). However, in a real situation, it is not always possible to conduct a gradation. Aggression often prevails in a conflict, and a persistent hostility towards each other is formed among the participants in the situation. Thus, the author violently reacts to the decision of the jury, forming the image of the enemy.

To make a decision, the jury must learn several legal rules, which they learn from the parting word of the judge. In the course of deliberations, jurors are constantly faced with the choice between ordinary and legal norms. As a rule, jurors feel obliged to comply with legal regulations. In particular, when describing the process of reaching a verdict, jurors constantly emphasize that the discussion was held by the requirements of the law and avoid mentioning its violations (Strathie et al., 2015). Thus, they talk about how the verdict was supposed to be delivered but not about how it actually happened. Wishing to emphasize their competence, the jurors pretend to have learned the rules of law even before the discussion, avoiding talking about what they learned during the discussion. Therefore, this could become one of the motivational movements for making a decision.

The result of the desire to follow legal norms is an attempt to apply them in a particular case. If this attempt fails, as it does in many cases, the jury falls back to using the ordinary rules. Thus, juries only use the rule of law in some cases (Taylor and Tarrant, 2019). In general, it can be assumed that the main difficulty in making a verdict is related to the inability of the jury to make a decision using official rules and without referring to their life experience and everyday ideas.

Concerning the critic, it should be said that critical statements can simply relieve nervous tension. This is one of the serious mistakes of the article’s author, as he broadcasts his personal opinion to the general public. Criticism is a complex process of business relationships, and its consequences can be very diverse (Mannes et al., 2019). In order for criticism to exist in business communication at the level of presenting useful information and to be accepted by the other side, a number of rules for constructive criticism have been developed. Compliance with these rules, although it will not completely relieve a person from the negative influence of criticism, will allow for maintaining relationships between people.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it should be said that the question of criticism cannot be fully resolved. However, overly active opposition to the decision of the jury is inappropriate since the conclusion is made collectively based on many factors. Moreover, jurors are directly involved in the process and are a separate society in court. Thus, they can develop common moral concepts and philosophies of decision-making. Jurors look at how closely a particular person’s behavior is related to the situation. Moreover, they note how constant it is over time and how similar it is to the behavior of other people in a similar situation. In this regard, the criticism of the author of the article can be considered biased with the lack of a clear argument about what happened.

Reference List

Boginskaya, O. (2020). ‘The simplification of jury instructions: legal-lay interactions in jury trials’, ESP Today, 8(2), pp. 297-318.

Cullen, H. J. and Monds, L. A. (2020). ‘Jury simulation studies: to exclude or not to exclude participants based on a lack of comprehension of the case?’, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 34(5), pp. 1224-1233.

Mannes, S., Foster, E. E. and Maier, S. L. (2018). ‘Jury instructions: how timing, type, and defendant race impact capital sentencing decisions’, Applied Psychology in Criminal Justice, 14(2), pp. 154-170.

Strathie, A., Turner J. and Barker, M. J. (2015). Living psychology: from the every day to the extraordinary. The Open University.

Taylor, J. and Tarrant, G. (2019). ‘Trial by social media: how do you find the jury, guilty or not guilty?’, International Journal of Cyber Research and Education, 1(2), pp. 50-61.