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When it comes to the deliberation of juries, there are several influences and processes that are involved. They can mainly be divided into intra psychic influences and inter-personal influences. Psychologists have researched the various factors that come under these two broad categories through many experiments which have yielded valuable insights into the understanding of jury deliberation.

Intra psychic influences are those that are formulated within the character of the juror. Examples of such intra psychic influences include the attribution theory and any stereotypes they may have.

The attribution theory is one of the major factors that contribute to a decision that a juror makes. It seeks to find out the causes of the way people behave, and to what they attribute these causes to. Heider (1958), who is the founder of the attribution theory, divided it into two sections. They are situational attribution and dispositional attribution. A dispositional attribution is based on a person’s character, while a situational one takes what happened during the scenario into account.

When jurors consider the attributions to the causes of the way criminals behave, they often make assumptions that are false. This then leads them to a conclusion which is not entirely true. There is a range of such factors that may contribute to the arrival of these biased conclusions. The fundamental attribution error, the just world hypothesis and hedonistic relevance are examples of such factors.

The fundamental attribution error happens when there is more emphasis placed on the disposition of an individual rather than on the effect of the situation. One experiment that has successfully demonstrated this concept is that of Stanley Milgram’s on obedience. The participants were placed in a situation where they had to administer electric shocks which gradually increased in pain to a learner when he made a mistake in recalling facts. The results showed a high incidence of participants who complied with these instructions. When the general public learned of the experiment, they immediately labelled the participants as ‘sadistic’ when in fact they were not. They were blaming the disposition of the participants. On the contrary, the participants despised the whole experiment and continually protested to be released from it. At the same time, they also felt trapped in the situation and were compelled to follow instructions, even though they knew the repercussions of their actions. It was indeed the situation that drove them to their actions.

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Another example is that of Jones and Harris (1967), where students were asked to recite an essay which was not theirs regarding the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba. Although the audience were explicitly told that the opinions held in the essays were not that of the students, the students reading out the essays were still assumed to have held those opinions.

Milgram’s obedience experiment showed how easily people can fall into the trap of the fundamental attribution error. However it was an experiment where the variables were controlled by Milgram, and it would be different from a ...

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