An experimental study of the effect of a judge's nonverbal behaviors on mock jurors' determination of a videotaped witness's credibility

Includes bibliographical references (pages 71-78)There has been little research into the role that nonverbal communication\ud plays in the courtroom. The legal system does not acknowledge\ud the importance of nonverbal behavior to the overall communication\ud process. It was suggested that the subtle nonverbal influence process\ud that has been identified in experimental research might also occur in\ud the courtroom as well.\ud It was predicted that positive and negative nonverbal behaviors\ud by the judge toward a witness would result in an increased positive or\ud negative evaluation of the witness's source credibility.\ud It was also predicted that more immediate head and body orientation would communicate a greater positive attitude than less immediate\ud head and body orientations.\ud To test these hypotheses eight different versions of a trial were\ud recreated on videotape by actors. Subjects acting as mock jurors then\ud watched one of the eight versions and were asked to evaluate the source credibility of the witness on semantic differential type scales consisting\ud of 25 bipolar adjectives that explored the dimensions\ud trustworthiness, expertness and dynamism.\ud The findings support both theoretical hypotheses. More immediate\ud head and body orientation resulted in changes in the predicted\ud direction. However, while the nonverbal effects did occur in the\ud predicted direction, the differences were significant only when the\ud independent variables polarities (positive or negative) were consistent.\ud In other words,(positjve) high head/(positive) high body\ud and (negative) low head/(negative) low body produced a significant\ud effect. In contrast, when the polarity was mixed (positive head/\ud negative body or negative head/positive body) there was no significant\ud effect. It appears that when the nonverbal behaviors' polarities were\ud mixed they tended to cancel out the influence of the other.\ud In addition to the above findings a significant difference was\ud found on two dimensions of source credibility (trustworthiness and\ud dynamism) when the two witnesses were compared for physical attractiveness.\ud This result tends to confound the findings of this study.\ud The findings were discussed and the methodological shortcomings\ud identified. Implications to the legal system, source credibility\ud reseanch and a number of possible future studies were proposed