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Race in the Courtroom: Perceptions of Guilt and Dispositional Race in the Courtroom: Perceptions of Guilt and Dispositional

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Samuel R. Sommers University of Michigan Phoebe C. Ellsworth University of Michigan Law School, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Ellsworth, Phoebe C. "Race in the Courtroom: Perceptions of Guilt and Dispositional Attributions." S. R. Sommers, co-author. Personality & Soc. Psychol. Bull. 26, no. 11 (2000): 1367-79.

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Race in the Courtroom: Perceptions of Guilt and Dispositional Attributions

Samuel R. Sommers Phoebe C. Ellsworth University of Michigan

The present studies compare the judgments of White and Black mock jurors in interracial trials. In Study 1, the defendant’s race did not influence White college students’ decisions but Black stu- dents demonstrated ingroup/outgroup bias in their guilt ratings and attributions for the defendant’s behavior. The aversive nature of modern racism suggests that Whites are motivated to appear nonprejudiced when racial issues are salient; therefore, the race salience of a trial summary was manipulated and given to noncollege students in Study 2. Once again, the defendant’s race did not influence Whites when racial issues were salient. But in the non-race-salient version of the same interracial case, White mock jurors rated the Black defendant more guilty, aggres- sive, and violent than the White defendant. Black mock jurors demonstrated same-race leniency in both versions of the trial, suggesting that racial issues are generally salient in the minds of Black jurors in interracial cases with Black defendants.

Jury decision making is a complex set of psychological processes in which jurors must attend to information, evaluate theories, resolve inconsistencies, and persuade one another in the pursuit of a verdict. Social psycholo- gists have long recognized the courtroom as a fruitful venue for the study of decision making and for years researchers have investigated the cognitive and motiva- tional processes underlying jurors’ decisions and the procedural variables that influence them. One glaring void in the existing research, however, is an issue that seems to be on everyone’s minds these days: race.

In the 1990s, race captured the public’s attention in a number of high-profile, controversial trials, but the prev- alence of racial issues in American criminal law is hardly a new phenomenon. Black defendants have suffered a long history of abuse at the hands of the criminal justice system, and only a few decades ago, White suspects in crimes committed against Black victims were rarely brought to trial, much less convicted (see Kennedy, 1997). Times have changed, of course, but maybe not as

much as we would like to think. Legal scholars have asserted that even in this age of political correctness, White jurors often demonstrate bias against Black defen- dants (Fairchild & Cowan, 1997; Parloff, 1997b). Black jurors have not escaped criticism either, and the mantra “Blacks won’t convict Blacks” has become a journalistic cliché in the wake of a few well-publicized acquittals of Black defendants by predominantly Black juries (Reynolds, 1996; but see Parloff, 1997a, 1997b). The assumption that jurors are affected by the race of a defendant is so widespread that prosecutors and defense attorneys across the country routinely incorporate racial considerations into their jury selection strategies (Reynolds, 1996), even though the Supreme Court has banned the use of peremptory challenges made solely on the basis of race (Batson v. Kentucky, 1986).

In light of the societal importance of this issue, the dearth of psychological research on race in the court- room is surprising. A search on PsycINFO under the keywords “race and (juror or defendant)” yielded only 27 articles written in this decade (e.g., Rector, Bagby, & Nicholson, 1993; Tinsley, 1991; Wittenbrink, Gist, & Hilton, 1997). Almost none of these studies consider the perceptions of Black jurors, and their results are incon- sistent and often ambiguous. Most investigators con-

Authors’ Note: The authors wish to thank Amy Bradfield, Samuel Gross, James Jackson, Saul Kassin, Mike Norton, Frank Yates, and numerous members of the SPSP listserver for their contributions to these studies and their comments on previous drafts of this article, and Richard Gon- zalez for his suggestions and statistical assistance. The authors also thank Karen Lutwin and Rachel Miller for their invaluable assistance in running participants for Study 2. This research was supported in part by a Clara Mayo Grant from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues awarded to the first author. Address correspondence con- cerning this article to Samuel Sommers, 3225 East Hall, Social Psychol- ogy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1109; e-mail: [email protected].

PSPB, Vol. 26 No. 11, November 2000 1367-1379 © 2000 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

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clude that race plays a role in juror verdicts and sentencing1 but some have found jurors to be biased against defendants of a different race (e.g., Klein & Creech, 1982; Sweeney & Haney, 1992), whereas others have found bias against defendants of the same race (McGowen & King, 1982). Some researchers have con- cluded that racial effects can be erased by judicial instruction (Pfeifer & Ogloff, 1991), by deliberation (Bernard, 1979), or by the absence of inadmissible evi- dence (Johnson, Whitestone, Jackson, & Gatto, 1995). Still other studies and meta-analyses find no evidence of racial bias (Mazzella & Feingold, 1994; McGuire & Bermant, 1977).

The few experiments that do include both White and Black participants suffer from methodological and con- textual difficulties. For example, Ugwuegbu (1979) used White participants in one study and Black participants in a second study, making the statistical comparison of Whites and Blacks impossible. More recently, Skolnick and Shaw (1997) found that White mock jurors treated White and Black defendants equally but Black mock jurors were more punitive toward a White defendant. However, this study, in which mock jurors were given the trial transcript of a man accused of fatally stabbing his White ex-wife, was conducted in Southern California during the O.J. Simpson civil trial, and the authors emphasize the importance of interpreting their “Black Racism” hypothesis in terms of that unique context.

Although there is little published research comparing White and Black jurors, a large body of work on inter- group interaction provides a psychological framework for the theoretical and empirical consideration of race in the courtroom. One of the most robust phenomena in psychology is ingroup/outgroup bias. Numerous studies have found that even when group assignment is based on the most superficial and trivial of criteria, people dem- onstrate a strong preference for fellow ingroup mem- bers and tend to denigrate outgroup members (Brewer & Brown, 1998; Tajfel, 1982). This ingroup/outgroup bias is manifested both in behavioral terms (e.g., allocation of resources, preference for physical proximity) and in people’s perceptions, particularly in their attributions of the behavior of ingroup and outgroup members (Hewstone, 1990).

Pettigrew (1979) has demonstrated that people tend to attribute the positive behavior of ingroup members to inherent dispositions and the positive behavior of outgroup members to situational forces; that pattern is reversed for attributions of negative behavior. This find- ing suggests a process through which the defendant’s race could potentially result in juror bias. Specifically, in some cases jurors may tend to attribute the criminal behavior of a same-race, ingroup defendant to situa- tional pressures and the same behavior of a differ-

ent-race, outgroup defendant to an inherent disposi- tion. For example, a White juror might explain the behavior of a White defendant charged with robbery as the result of pressure to provide financial support for his family. If the defendant were Black, this same behavior might be seen by a White juror as proof that the accused is an aggressive and immoral person. These different attributions imply very different perceptions of the defendant and could potentially lead to different ver- dicts and/or sentence recommendations. Hewstone’s (1990) review of intergroup causal attribution further suggests that White and Black jurors might interpret, integrate, and remember the evidence in a trial differ- ently depending on the race of the defendant (also see Bodenhausen & Wyer, 1985).

Building on research into ingroup/outgroup bias, we designed Study 1 as an initial investigation of the role of race in the courtroom, manipulating the defendant’s race in several criminal trial summaries and comparing the decisions of White and Black mock jurors. We were interested not only in traditional psycholegal measures such as guilt ratings and sentence recommendations but also in the attributions that participants would make for the behavior of White and Black defendants. We expected that any racial bias demonstrated by jurors’ guilt ratings and sentence recommendations would be present in their attributions for the defendant’s behav- ior as well.

STUDY 1

Method

PARTICIPANTS

Participants were recruited from two fraternities and two sororities at the University of Michigan. One frater- nity and one sorority were predominantly White, and the other two houses were historically Black. A total of 64 stu- dents served as mock jurors in return for contributions to their house funds. Sixty-two participants (97%) identi- fied themselves as either White or Black, and 2 partici- pants (3%) identified themselves as Asian American. Because our manipulations were intended to compare White and Black mock jurors’ decisions, the two Asian participants were dropped from the analyses. Of the 62 remaining participants, 33 were White (53%) and 29 were Black (47%), 38 were women (61%) and 24 were men (39%). Participants read trial summaries and answered written questions in groups solely composed of their fellow, same-race housemates. Four experimental sessions ranging in size from 7 to 20 participants were held, and all sessions were proctored by a White experimenter.

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STIMULUS TRIALS

Participants received a packet of 12 trial summaries, each of which consisted of one paragraph describing the prosecution’s case and one paragraph describing the defense’s case. Five of the trials involved a cross-racial crime; for each such racial trial, half of the participants read about a White defendant and half read about a Black defendant. Preceding each of these racial trials was a filler trial in which race was not mentioned. All partici- pants read the 12 trials in the same order.

The five racial incidents were as follows: (a) a college basketball player who allegedly assaulted a teammate after a heated locker room dispute in which racial lan- guage was used; (b) a young man who, along with four friends, allegedly surrounded a stranded motorist, told him that he should not have been in that neighborhood, and robbed him of his wallet; (c) a frustrated law school applicant who was upset about racial policies in the admissions process and allegedly held an admissions sec- retary hostage at gunpoint; (d) a middle-aged man who allegedly slapped his girlfriend at a bar after she made embarrassing comments about him in front of friends; and (e) an older man who allegedly burned down a church attended by congregants who were not of his race. In all of these trials, the victim (or church congre- gation) and the defendant were of different races.2

We chose cases that we thought would evoke common racial scripts, and we had no predictions about differ- ences among the five experimental scenarios. For this initial study, our aim was to discover whether White and Black respondents would respond differently to the White and Black defendants across the whole set of inter- racial trials. Accordingly, we considered the five trials as analogous to five items on a scale. Of course, some differ- ences between the trials were likely and potentially of theoretical interest, but our hypotheses focused on the general effects of a defendant’s race on White and Black mock jurors’ judgments of trials with similar racial content.

PROCEDURE

Mock jurors were told that they would be participat- ing in a project on legal opinions and that to get a repre- sentative sample of the university population, the experi- menter had recruited participants from several houses, organizations, clubs, and teams. Participants were instructed to read through the trial materials carefully and to take their role as mock jurors seriously. Each trial summary was followed by the legal criteria for conviction for each crime, adapted from the California State Penal Code. These definitions were included to increase the realism of the task and to provide mock jurors with the same verdict instructions that actual jurors receive.

Participants used 7-point scales (1 = not at all and 7 = very much) to respond to several posttrial questions. Par- ticipants were asked to rate how guilty they believed the defendant was and how convincing the defense’s case was. They also rated the extent to which (a) situational pressures and (b) the defendant’s personal character were responsible for his behavior. Finally, participants were given information about the maximum sentence allowed by the Penal Code for a defendant convicted of the crime in question and were asked to recommend a sentence for each defendant using options that ranged from probation to the maximum allowable sentence. These recommendations were then converted into a 7-point scale that increased with the severity of the sentence.

Results

Mock jurors’ judgments of the five racial trials were analyzed. For half of the mock jurors, three of the racial trials had White defendants and two had Black defen- dants; for the other mock jurors, three of the trials had Black defendants and two had White defendants. For each mock juror, an average score (for each dependent measure) was computed for the trials with a White defen- dant and for the trials with a Black defendant. These average scores were then analyzed using a two-way mixed-model analysis of variance (ANOVA), with race of defendant as a within-participant variable and race of mock juror as a between-participant variable. This allowed us to examine the general influence of race of defendant and race of mock juror and their interaction. We did not have specific predictions for differences in mock jurors’ responses to the five trial summaries because of their similar racial content.

A 2 × 2 mixed-model ANOVA of participants’ guilt rat- ings revealed that White defendants were given signifi- cantly higher guilt ratings (M = 5.28) than were Black defendants (M = 4.77), F(1, 56) = 6.49, p < .02. No main effect was revealed for race of mock juror, F(1, 56) < 1. The main effect was qualified by a significant interaction between race of defendant and race of mock juror, F(1, 56) = 5.53, p < .03, indicating that the race of a defendant influenced White and Black mock jurors differently (see Figure 1). White mock jurors did not differ in their guilt ratings of White and Black defendants, t(56) < 1 via planned comparison, whereas Black mock jurors gave White defendants higher guilt ratings (M = 5.69) than Black defendants (M = 4.48), t(56) = 3.35, p < .005 (see Table 1 for summary of cell means for all Study 1 depend- ent measures).

This general pattern of results, that White mock jurors seemed to be evenhanded in their judgments and Black mock jurors seemed to demonstrate ingroup/ outgroup bias, was found in four of the five racial trials

Sommers, Ellsworth / RACE IN THE COURTROOM 1369

mock jurors were not.3 These results are consistent with current popular media alarms about Black jurors’ refusal to convict Black defendants (e.g., Reynolds, 1996) and with the findings of Skolnick and Shaw (1997), which the authors attribute to “Black Racism.” However, given the long history of injustices suffered by Black defendants at the hands of all-White juries, we were surprised to find no effects for White mock jurors in Study 1.

One plausible explanation involves the nature of modern American racism. According to Gaertner and Dovidio’s (1986; Dovidio & Gaertner, 1991) theory of aversive racism, most middle-class White Americans have shifted from “old-fashioned” or “red-necked” racism to a less overt form of prejudice, one that exemplifies the conflict between an egalitarian value system and unac- knowledged negative beliefs about Blacks. The theory predicts that when racial norms are salient in a situation, most Whites will respond in an appropriately nonprejudiced manner, but in situations with more ambiguous racial norms, bias will often emerge:

When a situation or event threatens to make the negative portion of their attitude salient, aversive racists . . . vigor- ously try to avoid acting wrongly on the basis of these feelings. . . . In other situations, however, the underlying negative portions of their attitudes are expressed. (Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986, p. 62)

So, for example, when White people are reminded of the possibility of racial prejudice in an interaction, they may work to inhibit their own racial biases; if they are not re- minded, they might not notice, and their biases will of- ten be expressed.

During the course of a trial, racial issues may become salient in any number of ways, including, for example, pretrial publicity, voir dire questioning of potential jurors, opening and closing arguments, the nature of police testimony, attorneys’ demeanors, and sometimes the nature of the crime itself, as in a Ku Klux Klan con- frontation. O.J. Simpson’s murder trial provides a recent example of a trial in which racial issues were made salient by a defense attorney’s decision to “play the race card.” We argue that emphasizing the racial issues in a case tends to alert White jurors to the possibility of prejudice and make racial norms salient. Accordingly, when racial issues are obvious in a trial, a motivation to appear nonprejudiced is activated in White jurors. This predic- tion is supported by the results of Study 1, where the racially charged nature of the five experimental trials probably alerted White student jurors to the possibility of prejudice and the importance of avoiding it. A similar process may have occurred in the study by Skolnick and Shaw (1997), where participants were given a racially

charged crime scenario that closely resembled the Simpson case.

We would make different predictions for a run-of-the-mill case in which the defendant happens to be Black but race is not a salient trial issue. In such cases, White jurors should not be on guard against the possibil- ity of prejudice and they should be more likely to demon- strate racial bias. This prediction is supported by the findings of Fein, Morgan, Norton, and Sommers (1997), who, in a study of racial pretrial publicity, reached a simi- lar conclusion about the potential influence of race on White mock jurors: “If the pretrial publicity containing the racial information had been more subtle or in a dif- ferent context, participants might have been less con- cerned about race and, paradoxically, more likely to per- ceive the defendant stereotypically” (p. 499).

The theory of aversive racism is less helpful in explain- ing or predicting the behavior of Black mock jurors. The “historically racist culture” that Gaertner and Dovidio (1986) describe is White culture, and they do not discuss the social expectations and pressures that might influ- ence the behavior of non-White individuals. Because Black Americans have been victimized by White bias and institutional prejudice so frequently in the past, Blacks’ overt expression of racial preference may be more com- mon and considered less unacceptable than similarly biased sentiments voiced by Whites. Many White Ameri- cans are taught to believe that racism is unacceptable and are therefore motivated to deny their prejudiced attitudes about Blacks; Black Americans are more likely to be raised in an environment that is mistrustful of the egalitarian claims and promises of White America (Shelton, 2000) and they may have no particular motiva- tion to conceal their anti-White or pro-Black sentiments. Accordingly, racial preference may be more available to consciousness and more likely to be openly expressed by Blacks than by Whites (Jones, 1997, Note 3). Thus, Black participants in Study 1 may not have experienced the conflict between private and public values faced by White participants.

It is also possible that the bias demonstrated by Black mock jurors in Study 1 reflected their perceptions that the “true story” in the trials was different for the cases involving Black defendants than for the identically worded cases involving White defendants. Black partici- pants were certainly aware, perhaps even from personal experience, that police and prosecutors treat Blacks with more suspicion than Whites and they may well have assumed that racial discrimination played some role in the cases of the particular Black defendants they were asked to judge. In other research using the same student population, we have found empirical evidence that Black Americans have little faith in the colorblindness of the criminal justice system.4 Blacks are more likely than

Sommers, Ellsworth / RACE IN THE COURTROOM 1371

Whites to believe that Black suspects suffer discrimina- tion at the hands of White police officers and prosecu- tors and that Black defendants suffer discrimination at the hands of prosecutors, judges, and juries. As a result, Black Americans may tend to see almost all cases involv- ing Black defendants as racially charged. In Study 1, Black mock jurors’ bias may reflect a conscious attempt to level the playing field through same-race leniency (Jones, 1997) or it may reflect less deliberate differences in perceptions of the basic meaning of the events themselves.

These possible explanations for the performance of White and Black mock jurors in Study 1 lead us to believe that the scarcity of published studies of race in the court- room may partly reflect weaknesses in the standard strat- egies and assumptions of social psychological research into racial attitudes. In studies of race, concern about prejudice against Blacks has so dominated the field that the attitudes of Blacks usually have not been recognized as relevant (Shelton, in press). In addition, most psychol- ogy experiments use college students as participants, and there are often too few minority students available to fill the cells of a complete multifactor design. Beyond the practical limitations of the college participant pool, another concern is that the college campus may not be an environment conducive to valid research on expres- sions of White racism. College populations are hypersensitized to racial issues and nonprejudiced beliefs and behavior are strongly emphasized on most campuses. The results of Study 1 suggest that it might be difficult to get a realistic, representative measure of Whites’ racial attitudes by studying college student par- ticipants.5 To avoid the potential influence of campus politics in Study 2, we recruited noncollege students of all ages as participants, a strategy that also allowed us to better generalize our findings to the population as a whole.

Furthermore, common sense dictates that a researcher trying to study racial bias in mock jurors should choose stimulus trials that make race a highly salient issue. But given the nature of modern racial norms, the use of such racially charged trial materials could backfire and compel Whites to demonstrate less prejudice than usual. In response to this concern, and because explanations for Black juror decision making also revolve around issues of perceived race salience, Study 2 was designed to further compare White and Black mock jurors by manipulating the salience of racial issues in the stimulus trial. In this study, we manipulated race salience by varying the content of a statement alleg- edly made by the defendant during the incident in ques- tion. We expected that this small change in the testimony of one witness would create, in essence, two very differ- ent trials in the minds of White jurors. When presented

with a trial with a salient racial issue, we expected that racial norms would be made salient and White mock jurors would appear nonprejudiced, as they had in Study 1. On the other hand, in a trial that had no blatantly racial issues, we expected White mock jurors to be more punitive toward a Black defendant than toward a White defendant. Our predictions for Black mock jurors were that mistrust of the legal system would lead them to view both trials with Black defendants as race salient and that Black mock jurors would demonstrate some degree of same-race leniency in both versions of the trial.

STUDY 2

Method

PARTICIPANTS

Two White female experimenters approached partici- pants as they waited to depart from gates at a large inter- national airport and asked them to fill out a question- naire for a class project on legal opinions. Of the 211 participants who volunteered as mock jurors, 156 (74%) identified themselves as White and 55 (26%) as Black. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 89 (M = 42.6), and 118 (56%) were men and 93 (44%) women. This study used a 2 (White vs. Black defendant) × 2 (White vs. Black mock juror) × 2 (race-salient vs. non-race-salient trial) between-participants factorial design, and White and Black participants were randomly assigned to read one of the four versions of the trial summary.

STIMULUS TRIAL

A modified version of the barroom assault trial sum- mary from Study 1 was given to participants. Demo- graphic information about the defendant and the alleged victim was provided at the top of the page. This allowed us to convey the race of the individuals involved in a relatively subtle manner. In the White defendant groups, the following information was provided:

Defendant: Kevin Richman, 34-year-old White male, 6’ 1”, 190 lbs., computer analyst

Victim: Tonya Simmons, 26-year-old African American female, 5’ 5”, 125 lbs., day care worker

In the Black defendant groups, the following informa- tion was provided:

Defendant: Albert Barkley, 34-year-old African Ameri- can male, 6’ 1”, 190 lbs., computer analyst

Victim: Kelly Simmons, 26-year-old White female, 5’ 5”, 125 lbs., day care worker

In all versions of the trial summary, the prosecution charged the defendant with assault and battery. The prosecution alleged that the defendant and a group of

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coworkers were at a bar celebrating his recent promo- tion when his girlfriend stood up and started to “roast” him, poking fun at his physique and making jokes about his sexual performance. According to the prosecution, the defendant then yelled at Ms. Simmons, forced her into her chair, and slapped her across the face. This slap knocked Ms. Simmons to the ground and she injured her ankle in the fall. The defense conceded that the defendant slapped his girlfriend but argued that she had been drinking and making a fool out of herself, leading the defendant to try to “talk some sense into her.” The defense claimed that Ms. Simmons fell down because she was drunk, and the defendant expressed remorse for playing any role in her injury.

The crucial section of the case was Ms. Simmons’s tes- timony about what the defendant yelled at her. In the race-salient versions of the trial, she testified that the defendant yelled, “You know better than to talk that way about a White (or Black) man in front of his friends” (emphasis added) before he slapped her. In the non-race-salient versions, she testified that he yelled, “You know better than to talk that way about a man in front of his friends.” The only difference between the race-salient and non-race-salient versions was the men- tion of the defendant’s race in this exclamation. In other words, the crime in question was always cross-racial, but only in the race-salient trial did this racial difference play an explicit role in the commission of the crime. We expected that the race-salient statement would make racial norms salient for White mock jurors.

PROCEDURE

Participants were asked to read the trial summary and answer several written questions about the case. To increase the likelihood that participants would take their role as jurors seriously, they were told that the trial sum- mary they were about to read was based on a real case. After reading the case, participants were provided with the Penal Code criteria for conviction for misdemeanor assault and battery.

Participants used 9-point scales (1 = not at all and 9 = very much) to respond to several posttrial questions. Par- ticipants were first asked to rate how guilty the defendant was. To obtain more specific information about percep- tions of the defendant’s personality (as opposed to the more general attribution measure used in Study 1), we asked participants to rate the extent to which they believed the defendant (a) was an aggressive person and (b) was a violent person. To indirectly measure mock jurors’ perceptions of how salient racial issues were in the trials, we asked participants to what extent they believed the incident was the result of a racial conflict.6

Participants also were asked to choose a recommended sentence for the defendant from among nine choices

that ranged from no punishment to 6 months in jail and a $2,000 fine (the maximum allowable punishment for misdemeanor assault and battery according to the Penal Code). These recommendations were then converted into a 9-point scale that increased with the severity of the sentence. Finally, participants were asked for demo- graphic information and were debriefed.

Results

MANIPULATION CHECKS

At the end of the questionnaire, participants were asked to recall the age, race, and occupation of the defendant and victim. All participants correctly identi- fied the defendant’s race, and there were no between-group differences on accuracy for the other memory questions, all χ2(7) < 6.8, ps > .46. Participants’ ratings of the extent to which the defendant’s behavior reflected a racial conflict were used to check our race-salience manipulation (see Note 6). The mean rat- ing of mock jurors in the race-salient conditions was sig- nificantly higher (M = 3.59) than the mean of jurors in the non-race-salient conditions (M = 2.02), F(1, 194) = 23.04, p < .005. These results provide support for the validity of the manipulation.

GENERAL ANOVA RESULTS

ANOVAs revealed a significant three-way interaction of race of mock juror, race of defendant, and race salience for participants’ guilt ratings, F(1, 203) = 4.64, p < .04, and for participants’ sentence recommenda- tions, F(1, 202) = 9.20, p < .005. Participants were asked to rate how aggressive and how violent a person the defendant was, and these highly correlated measures, r(n = 209) = .84, were summed to create a negative trait rating; an ANOVA revealed a significant three-way inter- action for this measure as well, F(1, 194) = 6.39, p < .02. All ANOVAs performed for Study 2 used the regression approach, and all contrasts were run using a one-way ANOVA with eight cells to account for the unequal num- ber of White and Black participants.

RACE-SALIENT TRIAL

Replicating the results of Study 1, in a trial where racial issues were salient only Black mock jurors’ guilt ratings were affected by the race of the defendant (see Figure 2). A planned comparison indicated that White mock jurors did not differ in their guilt ratings of the White and Black defendant (respective Ms = 6.83, 6.50), t(203) < 1. Black mock jurors, on the other hand, gave the White defendant a higher guilt rating (M = 6.85) than the Black defendant (M = 5.40), t(203) = 1.82, p = .07. Mock jurors’ sentence recommendations also repli- cated the findings of Study 1: White mock jurors were not influenced by the race of the defendant, t(202) < 1,

Sommers, Ellsworth / RACE IN THE COURTROOM 1373

of Study 2 is that in a run-of-the-mill trial in which the defendant happens to be Black, White jurors’ judgments are influenced by racial bias.7

Black mock jurors demonstrated same-race leniency in both versions of the trial, and their judgments were not significantly influenced by our race-salience manip- ulation. Because previous data have indicated that Blacks have less faith in the fairness of the criminal jus- tice system, we predicted that Black mock jurors, com- pared to Whites, would view both the race-salient and non-race-salient versions of the trial of the Black defen- dant as somewhat racially charged. Participants were asked to judge the extent to which the crime was racially charged, and these ratings provided indirect support for our predictions. Further research will be necessary to directly test the hypothesis that in the trial of a Black defendant, race automatically becomes a salient issue for Black jurors. One possibility would be to use an implicit measure of the activation of racial thoughts among mock jurors, such as a lexical decision or word fragment com- pletion task.

Just as in Study 1, where mock jurors’ attributions for the defendants’ behavior were correlated with guilt rat- ings, in Study 2, mock jurors’ trait ratings revealed the same bias as their guilt ratings, r(209) = .64, p < .005. This result sheds light on the process through which race influences juror decision making. Mock jurors did not simply express prejudice through biased guilt ratings; these ratings reflected their different perceptions of ingroup and outgroup defendants’ dispositions and hence of the very nature of the crime. Although we can- not claim a causal link between these attributional biases and mock jurors’ guilt ratings, the role that dispositional attributions could play in biased decision making is evi- dent. Take, for example, a scenario in which a White juror has come to the conclusion that a Black defendant is guilty and should receive a long jail term. If accused by fellow jurors (or even by his or her own egalitarianism- driven conscience) of racial discrimination, the juror can point to the defendant’s aggressive and violent ten- dencies as the true reason for the guilty vote. But, in real- ity, this dispositional justification also has been influ- enced by racial bias, and this “objective evaluation” of the defendant’s character should not assuage the racial concerns of the juror or his or her peers.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The present studies demonstrate that explicit refer- ences to racial issues in an interracial trial have different effects on White and Black jurors. When White mock jurors realized that a case had racial overtones, they were on guard against prejudiced responses and maintained the appearance of fairness. But we expected that this racial norm would not be activated in the non-race-salient

trial, and Study 2 confirmed that White jurors tend to demonstrate bias when race is not a salient trial issue. These results qualify the conclusions of researchers who argue that today’s White jurors generally are nonprejudiced (e.g., Skolnick & Shaw, 1997) and cer- tainly refute the extreme claim that racial bias in the American legal system is confined to Black jurors (see Reynolds, 1996). Relating aversive racism theory to juror decision making provides a plausible explanation for these results, although further research into the condi- tions under which White jurors demonstrate racial bias is necessary to confirm the validity of this mechanism. For example, other possible explanations could be that acti- vation of racial norms in a race-salient trial increases Whites’ concern about social desirability or that Whites’ bias depends on the stereotypicality of the crime in question.

The present studies suggest that it is unlikely that the concept of racial fairness has the same meaning for the victims of discrimination as it does for the perpetrators. White prejudice and discrimination against Blacks is one of the most important and pervasive social problems in America, prompting energetic efforts to maintain aware- ness of the issue and to instill egalitarian values. The racial attitudes of Blacks have received far less attention from researchers, perhaps because of the fact that Blacks have historically been powerless to act on those attitudes (see Shelton, in press). The present results suggest that Blacks and Whites may experience the same tendency toward ingroup/outgroup bias, but perhaps only Whites are explicitly taught to stifle the expression of these atti- tudes, and perhaps they are only motivated to do so in some situations.

Furthermore, the courtroom might be one of the few settings in which Black Americans see an opportunity to personally contribute to the elimination of racial inequality in society. Because they are likely to view the criminal justice system as inherently biased, Black jurors’ conception of fairness may motivate them to demon- strate a measure of same-race leniency to compensate for that bias: “It is probably true that the burden of proof is heavier when the evidence is viewed through counternarrative scenario lenses, and the defendant is a Black man” (Jones, 1997, p. 254). This idea of fairness achieved through discrimination stands in sharp con- trast to the beliefs of White mock jurors, who seem to equate fairness in the legal system with colorblindness— a stance that is easier to adopt when one is a member of the more powerful majority group (Jones, 1997).

Of course, the present studies were conducted using only five criminal trial summaries; therefore, it will be necessary to replicate these results using a variety of stim- ulus trials. The trial used in Study 2 was ambiguous enough to allow racial issues to influence jurors, but

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these racial effects might have been attenuated if the evi- dence in the trial had been more one-sided (either for the prosecution or the defense) or if the crime in ques- tion had been considered more severe or heinous by jurors. In fact, strength of evidence (Kerr, Hymes, Anderson, & Weathers, 1995) and type and severity of crime (Sunnafrank & Fontes, 1983) have been found by researchers to be relevant considerations in studies of race in the courtroom.

In addition, the assault trial we used had a few idiosyn- crasies. First, issues of gender as well as of race were raised in this case of a man accused of assaulting his girl- friend. We included gender of mock juror as an inde- pendent variable in our analyses and found no signifi- cant main effects or interactions. Nonetheless, an interracial domestic relationship that sometimes bor- ders on abusive might carry with it cultural and historical baggage that make it a unique situation. Second, in the case we used there was no doubt that the defendant had committed the alleged act; the question of guilt revolved around the severity of his behavior and his mental state. It would be interesting to see whether similar racial effects occur in a case where the defendant claims the police arrested the wrong man. Racial bias (by police or jurors) is possible in both types of case but the nature of the bias might be different. In our case, bias seemed to affect the interpretation of ambiguous behavior. In an identification case, it could affect jurors’ judgments as to the validity of the evidence, such as the accuracy of police testimony or the credibility of the defendant’s alibi. These considerations lead to several interesting questions about the role of racial bias in juror decisions. For example, does Black jurors’ leniency toward Blacks reflect an overt motivation to compensate for probable injustice or a cognitive bias toward believing there is a good chance the defendant truly is not guilty? In other words, do Black jurors demonstrate same-race leniency as an attempt to level the playing field for Black defen- dants? Or are Black jurors, compared to Whites, more likely to believe in the actual innocence of Black defendants?

Beyond strength of evidence and type of crime, there are other relevant considerations that were not addressed by these initial studies. In Study 2, we manipu- lated race salience through a statement allegedly made by the defendant, but as mentioned in the Introduction, there are numerous ways in which racial issues can be made salient in a trial. Pretrial publicity, either about the particular case or about issues of racism in similar cases (e.g., Black drivers stopped and searched more often than Whites, Blacks treated more harshly for resisting arrest), might make race a salient issue. Attorneys may consciously or unconsciously emphasize race in voir dire, opening and closing arguments, or the presenta-

tion of evidence. Witnesses may raise racial issues during testimony, and jurors may raise them during delibera- tion. It also might be possible to experimentally manipu- late the salience of racial norms through nonconscious means, such as subliminal priming. Clearly, there is no single criterion method of manipulating race salience among the dozens of possible techniques, and it remains to be seen which of the various techniques have common effects.

In addition to using only one form of race salience, the present research investigated only the effects of the race of the defendant and juror, whereas the racial dynamics of actual courtrooms are obviously much more complex. Our decision to focus on the race of the defen- dant and juror opens our data to alternative explana- tions, the most obvious of which is that the race of the vic- tim was responsible for our findings. Race of victim has been identified by researchers (e.g., Foley & Chamblin, 1982; Hymes, Leinart, Rowe, & Rogers, 1993) and histo- rians as an influential factor in jury decisions. Accord- ingly, our findings in the non-race-salient condition of Study 2 could be interpreted as indicating that White jurors are more punitive toward people who commit crimes against White victims and Blacks are punitive toward those who harm Blacks, regardless of the race of the perpetrator.

However, attributional biases in both of the present studies were correlated with mock jurors’ guilt ratings (range of rs = .30 to .64), indicating that participants’ impressions of the trial were significantly related to per- ceptions of the defendant. Furthermore, if the victim’s race were driving our results, intuition suggests that White mock jurors would have been extremely punitive toward a defendant accused of a racially motivated crime against a White victim; no such pattern of results emerged in Study 1 or in the race-salient condition of Study 2. The present data indicate that different percep- tions of a defendant are significantly associated with dif- ferent guilt judgments, but the role of the victim’s race cannot be determined on the basis of the studies reported here, and it remains a variable that should con- sidered in future research.

It is also important to consider that participants in the present studies did not deliberate before rendering their posttrial ratings. Full-scale jury deliberation studies are enormously time-consuming and expensive, and it makes sense to begin a line of research with studies of individual jurors to assess which variables are most prom- ising for further investigation. But as Bernard (1979) forcefully argues, the generalizability of many psycho- logical studies of juror decision making is questionable, and most experiments ignore the role of deliberation in the decision process entirely. It is worth noting, however, that distributions of individual juror votes have been

Sommers, Ellsworth / RACE IN THE COURTROOM 1377

found to be very reliable predictors of jury verdicts (Kalven & Zeisel, 1966), especially for simple guilty- versus-innocent verdicts on a single charge as we used in the present research. But Bernard’s (1979) point is well taken, and we plan to investigate how deliberation affects the influence of race on mock jurors. The effects of deliberation will almost certainly vary with the racial composition of the jury (see Kerr et al., 1995), with a plausible initial hypothesis being that biases will be exag- gerated in racially homogeneous juries but attenuated in racially mixed juries.

Conclusion

The present studies fill a gap in the psycholegal litera- ture by comparing the decisions of White and Black mock jurors, and they identify a critical variable in juror decision making: race salience. More broadly, our find- ings suggest that explicit reference to ingroup/ outgroup issues might play a role in other types of inter- group interactions, affecting majority and minority group members in different ways. It might be worthwhile for psychologists to consider the role of salience in a vari- ety of ingroup/outgroup scenarios, such as employment interviews, application evaluations, and everyday charac- ter appraisals and behavioral predictions. One can easily imagine that explicit reference to issues of gender could have very different effects on men and women in a given situation, that highlighting the relevance of sexual ori- entation could affect heterosexual and gay people differ- ently, and so on. Based on the results of the present stud- ies, it seems that a group’s solidarity and status within society could be an essential variable for predicting the way in which people make decisions about ingroup and outgroup others.

Returning to the original questions of this investiga- tion, have modern White jurors learned to inhibit preju- dicial attitudes? The present studies suggest that they must first be reminded of racial norms. Is it true that “Blacks won’t convict Blacks?” In the present studies, Black jurors were consistently more lenient toward Black defendants, but our results do not support the conclu- sion that Black jurors refuse to convict Black defendants. Black mock jurors gave Black defendants higher- than-midpoint guilt ratings in both of the studies reported here, and in pretesting we have repeatedly found conviction rates in the 70% to 80% range among Black mock jurors judging Black defendants. It is impor- tant to point out that in spite of any tendency to correct against perceived injustices in the legal system, Black jurors still appear to give Black defendants high guilt rat- ings and make some dispositional attributions for their negative behavior. It is also worth emphasizing that the present studies suggest that White jurors (and by exten-

sion White police officers, White judges, White lawyers, etc.) still demonstrate bias in cases where racial issues are not emphasized, justifying Black jurors’ skepticism about the fairness of the criminal justice system.

NOTES

1. It is difficult to gauge how robust these racial effects are, however. Studies that find no evidence of racial bias are unlikely to be published, creating a “file drawer” problem that has undoubtedly contributed to the inconsistencies in the literature.

2. A more complete 2 × 2 × 2 design that also manipulated race of victim would have been preferable, but this study served as an initial investigation into race in the courtroom, and we chose to focus our resources on the two most central courtroom players: the defendant and the juror. The use of exclusively cross-racial crimes leaves open the possibility that jurors were influenced by the victim’s race and not the defendant’s race, an issue that we will address in the General Discus- sion. Our predictions and data, however, are consistent with the assumption that the defendant’s race was a significantly influential fac- tor in mock jurors’ decisions, and we have obtained similar results in another experiment that used a trial in which the defendant was charged with a “victimless” crime. Another approach in the present study would have been to withhold from participants information per- taining to the victim’s race, an alternative we rejected as unrealistic because jurors always have access to this information in an actual trial. To hold the victim’s race constant across conditions would have been similarly inappropriate because that would have produced some condi- tions with cross-racial crimes and some with same-race crimes. We used cross-racial crimes in all conditions because many critiques of Black jurors have focused on their performance in interracial trials (see Reynolds, 1996) and because doing so allowed for the race-salience manipulation used in Study 2. Nevertheless, a systematic analysis of the effects of a victim’s race on mock jurors is a necessary future step for the investigation of race in the courtroom.

3. It is statistically difficult to determine the relative influence of ingroup preference and outgroup derogation in jurors’ decisions. In Study 1, Black mock jurors’ judgments of White defendants do not sig- nificantly differ from Whites’ judgments of White defendants, and the same is true for judgments of Black defendants. Black mock jurors, however, significantly differ in their own ratings of White and Black defendants. We refer to this result as same-race leniency out of theoret- ical considerations that are addressed later in the Study 1 Discussion. But we do not rule out the possibility that anti-White sentiment is also responsible for this finding to some degree. To acknowledge this ambi- guity, we use the neutral terms ingroup/outgroup bias and racial preference throughout this article, except in instances when we believe there is reason to conclude that either ingroup or outgroup attitudes are chiefly responsible for the effect.

4. When asked to use a 7-point scale (1 = not at all and 7 = very much) to rate the extent to which a defendant’s race affects whether he or she receives a fair trial, Whites’ mean response of 4.69 was significantly lower than Blacks’ mean of 6.89, F(1, 182) = 19.57, p < .001 (Sommers & Ellsworth, 1998).

5. Of course, many noteworthy experiments involving stereotyping and prejudice have used college students as participants. But, in recent years, a good number of these studies have focused on subconscious priming effects and other implicit measures of prejudice (e.g., Devine, 1989; Dovidio, Kawakami, Johnson, & Johnson, 1997; Wittenbrink, Judd, & Park, 1997). Implicit measures could be used in studies of the legal system to gauge participants’ opinions about defendants or inter- pretations of trial evidence. However, not much is known about the connection between implicit responses and juror behavior, and an ini- tial investigation into the role of race in the courtroom seems best served by the explicit measurement of mock jurors’ perceptions used in the present studies. We would also add that college populations may be quite appropriate for understanding other, nonracial aspects of jury behavior, such as the effects of jury size, the order of presentation of evidence, and so forth.

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6. A direct measure would have asked, “To what extent did racial issues influence your perceptions of the trial?” But we believed that par- ticipants would be unable and/or unwilling to answer this question accurately (see Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Because our race-salience manipulation involved the racial motivation for the alleged crime, we used perceptions of the racial nature of the crime itself to indirectly gauge how salient racial issues were in the minds of mock jurors as they read the trial.

7. Had we selected a different race-salience manipulation that por- trayed the defendant in a more sympathetic light (e.g., pretrial public- ity about racial taunts he had endured), we would expect that White jurors would give equally lenient guilt ratings to both defendants in the race-salient condition and to the White defendant in the non-race-salient condition but a higher guilt rating to the Black defen- dant in the non-race-salient condition. The crucial comparisons, how- ever, would remain those between the White and Black defendant con- ditions of each version of the trial, with racial prejudice expected only in the non-race-salient version. The finding that the White defen- dant/non-race-salient cell had the lowest average guilt rating of the four White juror groups in the present study was not one of our predic- tions, and in a study using a different race-salience manipulation, we would not necessarily expect to replicate that result.

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Received November 2, 1998

Revision accepted June 17, 1999

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