Alonzo Richardson
PSYCH 424
Guilty By Association
Picture yourself, on trial for a crime you did not commit. The night you were arrested, you were driving home from work, and got pulled over. You, thinking you might’ve gone a little over the speed limit, turned to pick up your license and registration, but a voice yelled “put your hands where my eyes can see them”. Instantly, you were thrown out of the car onto the ground, and some hours later, you were sitting in a holding cell. That cell turned into months, and after trial, it turned into years. Some of the judges and jurors even looked like you. 10 years later, more conclusive evidence comes out that incriminates a completely different person, and you’re released. You don’t have much going on for you in the outside world, as most people you knew and loved stopped associating themselves with you once you were convicted, despite there being no evidence.
Now, why is this situation possible? What is it that made you so suspicious to the point that you became culpable for someone else’s crime? Jurors are people. Police are people. People not only make mistakes, but also have biases. We can only hope that fairness can be upheld by police or within a court of law, but arrests and verdicts don’t always end up that way, and limitations of fairness differ in every single case. There are a few ways in which social psychology can explain this phenomenon, and even serve to help some.
Firstly, I’ll analyze how the police can make this mistake. One way, simply put, is that they might not look like you. Although this might not sound very…sound, this occurrence is made possible by a phenomenon called the “cross-race effect”. A 2012 study conducted by Young, Hugenberg, Bernstein, & Sacco defines this effect as “the tendency for individuals to be better at recognizing and identifying faces of their own race than faces of a different race” (Gruman, 2017). You can literally just look guiltier when you have members of a different ethnic group making your arrest and placing you into criminal investigation.
Secondly, I’ll analyze how jurors and judges can make this mistake. The reasoning behind your conviction could be due to an expert persuading the jurors of your guiltiness because they might not like your gender or sexuality. It could be due to a judge not liking your race or religious background. For jurors, the verdicts they will reach are influenced by pre-trial beliefs, cognitive biases, and biased interpretations from “experts” (Curley, et. al, 2022). Implicit biases are scarier than explicit biases, as it’s become increasingly harder to openly admit bigoted beliefs. Moreover, research shows that judges usually don’t alert jurors to potential implicit biases that could arise (Kirshenbaum et. al, 2020) so it’s generally up to the jury to maintain a level of honesty and fairness.
To prevent scenarios like this from happening, there is no easy solution. Curing people of bias is impossible, but there are ways to better equip the legal system for these scenarios. For example, the deliberation process to reach said verdict is influenced by jury size, demographic backgrounds of the jurors, and many various other things. Jury size is typically 6-12 people chosen at-large from their community, based on the current American standard for trials, called the “adversarial model” (Gruman, 2017). Research shows that larger and more diverse juries tend to deliberate more than smaller ones and take more time to reflect on evidence (Gruman 2017), so that alone can reduce groupthink and really emphasize the importance of deliberating. Police and judges could benefit from more education on implicit bias (Kirshenbaum, et. al, 2020) and careful investigation, but it’s generally a pretty slow process.
References
Kirshenbaum, J. M., & Miller, M. K. (2020). Judges’ experiences with mitigating jurors’ implicit biases. Psychiatry, psychology, and law : an interdisciplinary journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, 28(5), 683–693. https://doi.org/10.1080/13218719.2020.1837029
Curley, L. J., Munro, J., & Dror, I. E. (2022). Cognitive and human factors in legal layperson decision making: Sources of bias in juror decision making. Medicine, science, and the law, 62(3), 206–215. https://doi.org/10.1177/00258024221080655
Gruman, J.A., Schneider, F.W., & Coutts, L.A. (2017). Applied Social Psychology. Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. SAGE.