Research Question: How does confirmation bias influence the juror’s decision-making while being involved in high-value court cases?
It is rather interesting for researchers and psychologists to know what factors affect a juror’s decision-making, especially when they are involved in high-value court cases. An article by Estrada‐Reynolds et al. (2015) explores a common suggestion that the jury is significantly affected by confirmation bias, and when exploring new evidence, they tend to use it to support their already developed opinion. The authors find this concept to be rather contradictory and test it in a juror setting against another suggestion (Information Integration Theory) that states that a jury uses the received facts and proofs in the direction of the message (Reynolds et al., 2015). Overall, the article finds that the Information Integration Theory is more correct than the statement that there is a strong effect of confirmation bias: in most cases, the jury allows the new proofs to impact their decision-making in a non-biased way.
As a consequence, it is evident that the identified study is directly related to the research question. The findings of Reynolds et al. (2015) allow for the development of the discussion on the topic and conclude that the influence of confirmation bias is not as strong as many researchers suggest. Since the authors conduct an experiment, one may trust their findings and explore further the effects of confirmation bias in the court. While supporting the Information Integration Theory, the study still showed that some jurors tend to stick to their initial verdicts when making the final one. Finally, it is essential to describe how the study by Reynolds et al. (2015) was found. In order to make sure that the article I use for this discussion post can help answer the research question, I accessed Google Scholar and typed the following terms: ‘confirmation bias’ and ‘jury.’
Reference
Estrada‐Reynolds, V. C., Gray, J. M., & Nuñez, N. (2015). Information integration theory, juror bias, and sentence recommendations captured over time in a capital trial. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 29(5), 713-722.