PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN Sommer et al. / BIASED DECISION MAKING When Juries Fail to Comply With the Law: Biased Evidence Processing in Individual and Group Decision Making

Two experiments examined individual and group decision mak-ing when decision criteria led to outcomes that violated distribu-tive justice. In Experiment 1, noncompliant individual jurors in a civil trial biased their determinations of negligence to award damages when the decision criteria prohibited an award. Experi-ment 2 replicated this effect at the group level and revealed that juries also biased their attributions of negligence to justify reduc-ing damages when the decision criteria required an excessive award. In both cases of noncompliance, juries recruited a biased subset of information during deliberations that sustained their decisions. Finally, noncompliant juries were marked by the advent of a “trigger ” person who raised justice concerns. Impli-cations for other decision-making groups and for the courts are discussed. For two centuries in the United States, juries of ordi-nary people have been considered bulwarks standing between potentially oppressive governmental agencies and private citizens. The framers of the U.S. Constitu-tion considered the jury in criminal trials to be among the basic safeguards against liberty-threatening incur-sions by a central government (Rakove, 1996). However, the power of the criminal jury to protect the prosecuted from the prosecutor, often despite overwhelming evi-dence of guilt, flies in the face of the judiciary’s view of a circumscribed role for the jury as finders of the facts and nothing more. Although the fact-finder role of the jury is the judicially preferred model of jury functioning, juries may nevertheless act as a purveyor of commonsense jus-tice, the application of a rough and ready sense of what is just and what is not (Finkel, 1995). Jurors may not only disobey the law in criminal trials (Horowitz, 1985, 1988) but they may consider issues of fairness when determining negligence in a tort (civil