Introduction Characterizing Jury Damage Awards The Issue of Identity: How Plaintiffs', Defendants', and Jurors' Characteristics Influence Damage Award Decisions Who is the Plaintiff? Who is the Defendant? Who are the Jurors? The Evidence: How Injury Severity and Litigants' Conduct Influence Damage Award Decisions The Severity and Nature of the Injury The Litigants' Conduct Decision Processes and Reforms: How Jurors Reason About Damages and how Damage Award Decisions Might be Improved How Jurors Reason About Damages Reforming Damage Award Decision Making Final Remarks and Recommendations

Determining Damages: The Psychology of Jury Awards

Two experiments were conducted to ascertain the effects of comparative negligence on damage awards. Participants awarded damages for a mock medical malpractice case in which the level of the plaintiff's negligence was varied. Both experiments showed that damage awards were doubly discounted for partially negligent plaintiffs. Experiment 1 also found that the responses of college students did not differ from those of people who had been called for jury duty. Experiment 2 examined four components of the damage award and showed that the reduction due to the level of the plaintiff's negligence occurred only in damages for bodily harm. Implications for the judicial system are discussed.

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Double Discounting: The Effects of Comparative Negligence on Mock Juror Decision Making

Imagine a day in the life of a typical juror, whether in England, Canada, New Zealand, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, or the United States. Upon arrival in court he or she is beset by a complex system of rules and procedures that are well rehearsed and well understood by the professionals who work in those settings, but complicated and obtuse to the newcomer. In some jurisdictions, the complexity is amplifi ed by the jury selection process. In Canada, for example, two lay “triers” selected from the pool of potential jurors determine whether their fellow jurors can be impartial. In the US, the prosecutor and defense attorneys dismiss potentially biased jurors based either on readily apparent juror prejudices or on attorneys’ intuitions about prospective jurors’ inclinations. The stated purpose of jury selection in these jurisdictions is to assure the court that those jurors who remain are impartial. But for the prospective juror the questioning process involves a number of complicated cognitive tasks, including reconstruction of the past, forecasting of the future, and inferential reasoning. In any jury trial, empanelled members must sift through confl icting arguments and evidence presentations and a series of exhaustive jury instructions that frequently involve concepts and language unfamiliar to most laypeople. In England, Australia, and Canada, jurors hear summations of the evidence by the judge that may differ in signifi cant ways from attorneys’ arguments. Then, during their deliberations, jurors are asked to recall vast amounts of trial evidence, expected to understand and apply their instructions, and ultimately, to decide on an “appropriate” verdict. These procedures beg the question, how do jurors decide on an “appropriate” verdict? How willing, able, and motivated are they to process the large volume of trial evidence, some of it contradictory in nature? How do they assess and combine disparate sources of information? By what process do they evaluate and use the trial evidence in reaching their decisions? How do their prior experiences and preconceptions regarding the judicial

Juror Decision‐Making

This study examined whether special jury instructions or the bifurcation of liability and compensation decisions would counter the tendency for evidence concerning the defendant's liability to affect damages awards. Mock jurors made liability and award decisions in response to a case description in which the level of defendant responsibility for the plaintiff's injuries and the type or timing of damages instructions were systematically varied. Instructions not to discount awards for uncertainty about the defendant's fault and instructions not to increase awards to punish the defendant's carelessness reduced the impact of the defendant's conduct on awards, while bifurcation did not. Additional findings suggest, at least in the context of the present study, that discounting may be a somewhat more potent process than surcharging. Possible explanations for these effects are discussed.

The Impact of Jury Instructions on the Fusion of Liability and Compensatory Damages

Purpose. This study focuses on two psychological mechanisms that may inadvertently affect judges' decisions on proof of guilt and on punishment. It involves mechanisms that are clearly in conflict with formal judicial doctrine. One hypothesis, the conviction paradox, asserts that, faced with very serious offences, a judge's standard of proof will be lower than for less serious, but otherwise comparable, offences. A second hypothesis, compensatory punishment, asserts that in cases with relatively weak evidence, judges who nevertheless render a guilty verdict will be inclined to compensate their initial doubt on the matter of guilt by meting out a less severe sentence. Method. The hypotheses are evaluated in an experiment with Dutch judges and justices who serve in criminal courts. This was done using fictitious but highly realistic dossiers of criminal cases. Results. Neither of the two hypotheses was supported in the present study. Conclusions. Findings are discussed in relation to their implications for theory development and future research in the area of legal decision making. © 2007 The British Psychological Society.

Paradoxes of proof and punishment: Psychological pitfalls in judicial decision making

: The comparative negligence doctrine is a rule in our system of civil justice which allows partial compensation of plaintiffs who are partly at fault for their own injuries. Forty-one states have a comparative negligence law today, while remaining nine operate under an older law (called contributory negligence or 'contrib'), which denies plaintiffs such partial compensation. Many of the states with the new law have just recently switched, and some of the nine are currently considering a change. By analyzing jury decisions in San Francisco under both the old and the new law, this study measures the effects of comparative negligence law on plaintiffs' awards. The law of comparative negligence instructs jurors on the apportionment of damage awards when the plaintiff is partially at fault. The comparative law asks the jury to divide damages between the plaintiff and negligent defendants according to relative fault. Thus, a plaintiff 50 percent responsible for his own injuries receives half of his total damages, and one 10 percent responsible receives 90 percent. Additional keywords: Tables(data); Charts.

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Michael G. Shanley

Papers

Comparative Negligence and Jury Behavior