Incidental emotion and juror decision making in an insanity case

Abstract

Previous research has shown that persistent negative perceptions of the insanity defense may result in juror bias in cases where a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) would be legally appropriate. These negative perceptions may be compounded by racial bias when the defendant is Black. This study examines the impact of manipulated incidental anger and defendant race on juror verdict outcomes. U.S. jury eligible participants (N = 162) completed an incidental anger manipulation task (Peter-Hagene & Bottoms, 2017) and the positive and negative affect scale (PANAS; Watson et al., 1988). They then read a fictional trial transcript in which a man meeting the diagnostic criteria for paranoid schizophrenia is charged with second degree murder. Participants then provided dichotomous verdicts of not guilty or NGRI, along with a confidence rating and a short rationale. We conducted a hierarchical logistic regression which revealed that incidental anger and defendant race were not significant predictors of verdict outcome. However, an exploratory mediation analysis revealed that incidental anger significantly predicted sadness, and that sadness yielded a decreased likelihood of a guilty verdict. The result of the exploratory analysis supports previous research which suggests that feelings of sadness result in more effortful and elaborate cognitive processing and therefore fewer guilty verdicts, which could explain the non-significant results of our initial hypothesis.