An experimental study of punitive damage awards in personal injury cases was conducted, using jury-eligible respondents. There was substantial consensus on judgments of the outrageousness of a defendant’s actions and of the appropriate severity of punishment. Judgments of dollar awards made by individuals and synthetic juries were much more erratic. These results are familiar characteristics of...

Pittsburgh lies fifty miles north of the Mason Dixon line, the accepted dividing line between those two great districts of the nation known as the North and the South. Below this line lies Dixie, the Old South, the Deep South, the once Solid South, dominated by the plantation with its one-crop system of agriculture. Here lies the Kingdom of Jim Crow, with its Black Belt, sharecroppers, backdoor...

Juries in medical malpractice trials are viewed as incompetent, antidoctor, irresponsible in awarding damages to patients, and casting a threatening shadow over the settlement process. Several decades of systematic empirical research yields little support for these claims. This article summarizes those findings. Doctors win about three cases of four that go to trial. Juries are skeptical about ...

Jury trials play a centrally important role in the law, and they are also of interest to psychologists. The manner in which individual jurors perceive, interpret, and remember evidence, as well as the group processes involved in jury deliberation, can be described in terms of fundamental cognitive and social psychological concepts. Juries provide a real-world laboratory for examining theoretica...

Criminal juries make decisions of great importance. A key criticism is that they are unreliable in a multitude ways, from exhibiting racial or gendered biases, to misunderstanding their role, engaging impropriety such as internet research. Recently, some have even claimed the use creates injustice on large scale, cause low conviction rates for sexual criminality. Unfortunately, empirical resear...