As someone who is often quick to defend people accused of serious crimes like rape and murder, I am constantly dumbfounded at how absolutely certain people can be that a person they’ve never met and usually never even heard of are guilty of horrific crimes when nothing but the raw accusation has been made public.  I’m equally dumbfounded at how many of these same people can be so unreasonably skeptical when presented with the same amount of information about a total stranger doing something good for others.

Image Credit: Jason Morrison

A recent study conducted at the State University of New York at Buffalo probed this very question, and came up with some surprising results.  The researchers provided subjects with a given fact pattern about a conversation inside a corporate boardroom.  The factual summaries between the two groups were identical except for a single word.  Where half the summaries used the words “help”, “helped”, and “helping” the other half of the summaries used the words “harm”, “harmed”, and “harming”.  For example, where half the research subjects saw the sentence “The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, ‘We are thinking of starting a new program. We are sure that it will help us increase profits, and it will also help the environment.’”, the other half saw “The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, ‘We are thinking of starting a new program. We are sure that it will help us increase profits, and it will also harm the environment.’”

Research subjects were then asked questions about the Chairman’s intent in carrying out the program.  The results were startling.  Only 60% of research subjects given “the help scenario” believed the Chairman knew the program would help the environment. By contrast, 90% of subjects given “the harm scenario” believed the Chairman knew the program would harm the environment.  Furthermore, while only one in three of the “help scenario” subjects indicated that their answer had a maximum degree of certainty, two out of three of the “harm scenario” subjects were certain to the maximum extent.

If the findings of this study prove to be consistent in different situations, it could have important implications for the way we find people guilty of crimes.  If people are inherently predisposed to believing accusations of criminal behavior, and not as predisposed to believe accusations of non-criminal behavior, then it follows that the notion of “innocent until proven guilty” goes against our basic nature.  That would mean that we need to re-think the way the current jury system works.

One of the fundamental rules of the American criminal justice system is that jury verdicts are sacrosanct.  If a jury verdict is to be overturned or a mistrial declared, it can only be because it’s plainly obvious to everyone familiar with the proceedings that the jury ignored an order of the judge, either by clearly considering evidence that the jury was told not to or by ignoring an instruction from the judge that asked them to conclude some particular fact.  Verdicts can also be overturned where the jury’s conclusion was clearly not consistent with the evidence.  While this is a reasonable rule, the fact of the matter is that judges bend over backwards to leave jury verdicts in place even if their rationale is plainly compromised or nonsensical. 

A while back, Alex Knapp wrote an essay suggesting that America could benefit from a professionalized jury system.  This would certainly be an effective hedge against this problem.  Part of the training for professional jurors could be in spotting this sort of cognitive bias and learning how to avoid it.  But one need not go that far to help remedy the problem.  Judges could simply be more cognizant of these biases and be more aggressive in holding the prosecutor to their burden of proof. Also, if judges were more willing to overturn questionable jury verdicts, that would also cut down on the problem of this bias.

While this sort of bias is automatically triggered by a criminal charge, the same bias could also be exploited by defense attorneys.  Given the knowledge that accusations of wrongdoing are more likely to be given serious consideration by a jury, defense attorneys could wrap the evidence into a narrative of a police officer’s or victim’s malfeasance instead of presenting their client to the jury as “a good person in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Psychological research is just starting to scratch the surface of many of the questions about how human beings made judgments and decisions.  The more we discover about biases and other analytical shortcuts our minds take, the better we understand why we think the way we do.  As this area of study progresses, it may well require us to look at some of our most fundamental traditions with a skeptical eye in order to ensure that justice is done.  We may even need to take remedial measures to ensure that the quirks of our primate brains do not interfere with our search for the truth, thereby ensuring that the innocent are not found guilty.