Are consistent juror decisions related to fast and frugal decision making? Investigating the relationship between juror consistency,decision speed and cue utilisation

Abstract

The aim of this study was to establish whether more consistent/accurate juror decision making is related to faster decision-making processes which use fewer cues – that is, fast and frugal heuristic processes. A correlational design was implemented with the co-variables: consistency of verdict decisions (participant decisions compared to the actual court verdicts), decision speed, and cue utilisation (the number of cues used to make a final verdict decision). Sixty participants read information about six murder trials which were based on real cases and whose outcome verdicts were deemed to be correct by the Scottish legal institution. Three of the cases had been handed down ‘not guilty’ verdicts, and three had been handed down ‘guilty’ verdicts. Participants read opening statements and were then presented with a block of prosecution evidence, followed by a block of defence evidence. They were then asked to make a final verdict. All three co-variables were significantly related. Cue utilisation and speed were positively correlated, as would be expected. Consistency was negatively and significantly related to both speed and cue utilisation. Partial correlations highlighted that cue utilisation was the only variable to have a significant relationship with consistency, and that the relationship between speed and consistency was a by-product of how frugal the juror was. Findings support the concept of frugal decisional processes being optimal within a juror context. The more frugal a decision is, the more likely jurors are to be to be accurate/consistent.