Psychology and the courtroom

• WITNESS - CONFIDENCE

  PENROD & CUTLER - the more confident a witness is that they have correctly identified a suspect the more likely the jury is to convict them. They found that when a witness said they were 100% confident there was a 67% conviction rate but when the witness said they were 80% confident there was a 60% conviction rate.
• WITNESS - LANGUAGE

  LAKOFF - witnesses, who said ‘ I think, maybe, perhaps’ more, were perceived as less intelligent, likeable and believable so would be less likely to convince a jury.
• DEFENDANT - ATTRACTIVENESS

  SIGALL & OSTROVE

  Attractive people are seen as good, which is the ‘halo effect’ and thereby are given a lower sentence. Putting. 120 students into three conditions based on attractiveness of the defendant they were asked to recommend a prison sentence from 1 to 15 years. The less attractive defendant was given a longer sentence on average.
• DEFENDANT - ACCENT

  SEGGIE

  Certain regional accent are perceived as more positive. People with standard accents are rated positively on traits such as intelligence and competence in comparison to people with non-standard accents. SEGGIE studied this and found that the broad Australian accent was considered to be more guilty for blue collar crime whilst the British accent was seem to be more guilty for white collar crime.
• DIXON

  Aim- to investigate the impact of accent, race and crime committed

  Method- A lab experiment using 119 white undergraduate psychology students. They listen to a two minute recorded transcript which was a conversation between a police inspector and a young male suspect who was pleading his innocence. The race, type of crime and accent were all varied within the transcript.

  Results- the Birmingham accent was rated more guilty. Significantly higher guilty ratings were found for the Birmingham accent/black suspect/blue collar crime condition than the other conditions.
• APPLICATION - ATTRACTIVENESS

  Lawyers should get their clients to present themselves in a positive way. It could also be suggested to remove the influence of attractiveness altogether by using screens in court for witnesses/defendants to give evidence from behind.
• APPLICATION - MINIMISE ACCENT

  It could be suggested that voice changing technology be used to prevent accent being a negative influence on a jury’s decision.
• APPLICATION - INCREASE WITNESS CONFIDENCE

  Ensuring that witnesses present information in a confident manner and state that they are confident can also be used to influence jury decision-making.
• APPLICATION - ORDER OF TESTIMONY

  PENNINGTON & HASTIE - The use of story order could be a strategy to persuade juries. The reason for this would be because story order is easier for the jury members to make sense of the evidence, allowing them to create and understand a story of what happened that they can be confident in although if both sides use story order there is no advantage.