The power of meaningful numbers: Attorney guidance and jury deliberation improve the reliability and gist validity of damage awards.

OBJECTIVE: A mock jury experiment tested the effects of attorney guidance and jury deliberation to mitigate the challenges that civil juries face in assessing damages. HYPOTHESES: We hypothesized that two types of attorney guidance (per diem, per diem + lump sum), theoretically based in the Hans-Reyna model of jury decision making, would improve jury decision making compared with no guidance against five key benchmarks: injury assessment, validity, reliability, verbatim-gist coherence, and metacognitive experience. We expected that deliberation would increase reliability of, confidence in, and polarization of awards compared with predeliberation. METHOD: Community members (N = 317; 61% women; 86.1% White; Mage = 48.68 years) deliberated in 54 mock juries. Participants watched a videotaped trial involving an automobile accident in which two plaintiffs sustained concussions (one mild and one severe). The plaintiffs' attorney's closing arguments varied attorney guidance (no guidance, per diem, per diem + lump sum). Mock jurors provided individual judgments before deliberating as a jury and reaching group verdicts and awards. RESULTS: Juries performed well against benchmarks. Providing gist-based guidance with a meaningful award recommendation increased the validity of jurors' individual damage awards (η²p jurors = .03) and the reliability of jury damage awards (η²p jurors = .04; η²p jurors = .20); gist-based guidance without an award recommendation did not improve performance against benchmarks and increased perceptions of decision-making difficulty (η²p = .13). Deliberation increased reliability of (η²p = .17), confidence in (η²p = .02), and polarization of (d = 2.14) awards compared with predeliberation. CONCLUSION: Juries performed well against objective benchmarks of performance (injury assessment, validity, reliability, and verbatim-gist coherence), and deliberation improved performance compared with predeliberation decisions. Jury decisions were further influenced by attorney closing arguments (the guidance manipulation), especially when the attorney requests a lump sum, which can serve as a powerful influence on jury awards, mainly by setting an upper limit. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

From meaning to money: Translating injury into dollars.

Legal systems often require the translation of qualitative assessments into quantitative judgments, yet the qualitative-to-quantitative conversion is a challenging, understudied process. We conducted an experimental test of predictions from a new theory of juror damage award decision making, examining how 154 lay people engaged in the translation process in recommending money damages for pain and suffering in a personal injury tort case. The experiment varied the presence, size, and meaningfulness of an anchor number to determine how these factors influenced monetary award judgments, perceived difficulty, and subjective meaningfulness of awards. As predicted, variability in awards was high, with awards participants considered to be "medium" (rather than "low" or "high") having the most dispersion. The gist of awards as low, medium, or high fully mediated the relationship between perceived pain/suffering and award amount. Moreover, controlling for participants' perceptions of plaintiffs and defendants, as well as their desire to punish and to take economic losses into account, meaningful anchors predicted unique variance in award judgments: A meaningful large anchor number drove awards up and a meaningful small anchor drove them down, whereas meaningless large and small anchors did not differ significantly. Numeracy did not predict award magnitudes or variability, but surprisingly, more numerate participants reported that it was more difficult to pick an exact figure to compensate the plaintiff for pain and suffering. The results support predictions of the theory about qualitative gist and meaningful anchors, and suggest that we can assist jurors to arrive at damage awards by providing meaningful numbers. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Gist of Juries: Testing a Model of Damage Award Decision Making.

Despite the importance of damage awards, juries are often at sea about the amounts that should be awarded, with widely differing awards for cases that seem comparable. We tested a new model of damage award decision making by systematically varying the size, context, and meaningfulness of numerical comparisons or anchors. As a result, we were able to elicit large differences in award amounts that replicated for 2 different cases. Although even arbitrary dollar amounts (unrelated to the cases) influenced the size of award judgments, the most consistent effects of numerical anchors were achieved when the amounts were meaningful in the sense that they conveyed the gist of numbers as small or large. Consistent with the model, the ordinal gist of the severity of plaintiff's damages and defendant's liability predicted damage awards, controlling for other factors such as motivation for the award-judgment task and perceived economic damages. Contrary to traditional dual-process approaches, numeracy and cognitive style (e.g., need for cognition and cognitive reflection) were not significant predictors of these numerical judgments, but they were associated with lower levels of variability once the gist of the judgments was taken into account. Implications for theory and policy are discussed.

Science in the jury box: jurors' comprehension of mitochondrial DNA evidence.

Questions about how jurors understand and apply scientific evidence were addressed in a mock jury study in which 480 jury pool members watched a videotaped mock trial that included expert testimony about mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) evidence purportedly linking a defendant to a crime. Collectively, jurors showed moderately good comprehension of the mtDNA evidence, although some made definitional and inferential errors. Comprehension was better among jurors with higher educational attainment and more mathematics and science courses. Lower comprehension was associated with jurors' reservations about science and concerns about the contamination of mtDNA evidence. The results suggest that most jurors are capable of comprehending and employing scientific evidence presented during trial, although errors and doubts about the evidence should be anticipated.