Gender effects on individual verdicts and on mock jury verdicts in a ...

After completing the trial survey, each student was asked to move to a circle of chairs
with others in their preassigned (number of females) group, to be a juror. This was not
always the group they had signed up for. For example, only 8 men may have signed up
for a group of 2 women and 10 men. A second group on the same day, at the same time,
was 8 women and 4 men, and a third group was 4 women and 8 men. If a total of 17 men
and 13 women showed up, we ran two real groups as best we could, e.g., 2 women and 9
men and 4 women and 8 men. The remaining 7 women sat as a jury, but were not counted
as a jury. (The smallest sized jury counted was 10, e.g., 10 men). The first person to
finish in each group was asked by the experimenter to be the foreperson on the jury. (This
was done to save time and to maximize the time available to jurors to try to reach a
verdict). They were told this would involve their telling the group that they would have to
try to reach a unanimous verdict, like a jury. First, the foreperson would ask everyone to
write their verdict on a piece of paper, fold it and pass it to her/him. If not unanimous,
then the foreperson was asked to announce the vote, and then lead a discussion
preliminary to a second ballot and, if necessary, a third. The foreperson was given a copy
of the trial and told to consult it if jurors couldn't recall, recalled incorrectly or disagreed
about facts in the case.
If, after three ballots, there was no unanimous verdict, and there was no change from the
second to third ballots, then the experimenter asked the jurors if anyone voting "guilty"
would, no matter how long the jury took, never change their vote; and the same was
asked of those voting "not guilty." If at least one person in each category indicated they
would never change their vote, the jury was judged to be hung. Otherwise, they were
asked to engage in another discussion and vote, which was the last vote. When the verdict
either was unanimous or hung, then written feedback as to the purpose of the experiment
was passed around to be read and discussed.
RESULTS
<strong>Gender</strong>
Based on the finding that more females than males vote guilty in simulated rape trials
(Fischer, 1991), it was hypothesized that the number of guilty verdicts would increase as
a function of the number of women on the jury, at least once women were a majority. As
a first test of this hypothesis, the expected gender effect on individual verdicts was
assessed. This was done using a logistic regression of five demographic variables
(gender, marital status, ethnicity, age, and number of siblings) and their second order
interactions on guilty verdicts. This model classified only 66.8% of verdicts correctly,
with gender and the gender by siblings interaction the only statistically significant <strong>effects</strong>
(logl = 3.15, SE = 1.45, p [less than] .05; logl = 0.34, SE = 0.06; p [less than] .05,
respectively). As expected, more women than men voted guilty, i.e., 86% of the 426
females versus 66% of the 398 males. Also, males (but not females) from smaller families
(e.g., 2 or fewer siblings) were somewhat more likely to vote guilty than males from
larger families.
Table I summarizes data relating to the hypothesis that the number of guilty verdicts