Assistant Psychology Professor Samuel Sommers' paper, "On racial diversity and group decision-making: Identifying multiple effects of racial composition on jury deliberations," was recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Sommers studied trends in mock juries, comparing how all-white and more diverse juries differ in their group decision-making processes. His research concludes that group member are more receptive, and that group performance is enhanced, on diverse juries. This week, we talk to Sommers about the implications of his study on the U.S. legal system and other situations involving group decision making.
Paul Lemaistre: What were your initial motivations for this study? Was it based off previous research, or did more casual observations prompt you to examine these issues more closely?
Samuel Sommers: First of all, from a legal perspective, there is a lot of debate and controversy in regards to race: To what extent does the race of a defendant influence the way they are treated by a jury? To what extent does race influence an attorney in jury selection? A lot of these questions focus on the racial composition of the juries themselves.
You'll hear people asking questions like whether the juries would have delivered different verdicts in the O.J. Simpson or the Rodney King cases, for example, had the racial composition of the jury been different. My thought as an experimental psychologist was to study this empirically: What are the actual effects of these different compositions of a jury as opposed to anecdotal [effects]?
PL: The research suggests that members of a majority within a diverse group are more willing to talk about issues of race than in more homogenous panels. In all-white groups, when jurors brought up issues of race as a factor, other jurors would try to change the subject or discredit it as [unimportant]. Were the white jurors aware of the fact that they were doing this?
SS: If you said to them, "What you were trying to do was minimize discussion about race," they would deny that and claim that it was irrelevant. I think that they genuinely believed [race] wasn't a relevant issue.
The study suggests that the diverse groups did things differently in making their decision and discussing the case than in all-white groups.
The diverse groups were more willing to discuss controversial issues like race or racism than were all-white groups. The diverse groups also raised a wider range of perspectives, made fewer factual errors and brought up a broader range of information from the case than did the all-white groups.
When [racial issues] came up in these all-white groups you would see this knee-jerk response of people saying, "What does this have to do with anything?"
I think the white jurors were genuinely surprised and caught off guard when racism was brought up. They wouldn't expect it when the issues were brought up by other white people.
PL: Was the willingness of white jurors on the diverse panels to address race issues motivated by their desire to appear open-minded or politically correct?
SS: That's a reasonable conclusion. What I think is a reasonable conclusion is that at some level being in a diverse setting activates whites' concerns and reminds them of their motivations to, at the very least, appear fair and open-minded.
Again, there are exceptions, but across the board, white people spend a lot of their time in predominantly [homogenous], if not all-white, settings. I think that when they are in a more diverse setting, that maybe reminds them of some motivations and thought processes that they might not typically think of.
PL: The study participants were members of a mock jury where they were asked to deliver hypothetical decisions on defendants' cases. Does their status as a body delivering verdicts on others raise the stakes of their decision and alter the study than would a more casual setting?
SS: Of course not all cases are criminal cases, and not all criminal cases are for felonies. The stakes are high for a jury but not to the same extent for other types of organizations. I think that it is a unique setting in many respects.
I also do think though that the results of the study have some other implications for other types of groups that make decisions, including in the boardroom, the workplace or students in the classroom for that matter.
In my study these effects happen even though these are mock juries that don't deliberate life and death, incarceration-type issues.
They take it very seriously and are engaged, but at the end of the day nobody is going to prison because of their decision. We still do find these effects in real cases where the stakes are certainly higher.
PL: Attorneys will often eliminate jurors of certain races to obtain a jury composition for more favorable verdicts for their client. Given these findings that racial diversity positively affects group performance for both white and black group members, what consequences does this have for the court system as a whole?
SS: The tendency that you mention, which is very true, doesn't necessarily serve the interest of jury performance. [My] findings suggest that diverse juries really do perform better. Better is a hard concept [to define] when it comes to a jury because you never know what the right decision is in a trial.
But they're better in this case because they bring up a wider range of information and are generally truer to the facts. Those are things that you want the jury to be. That's not to say that lawyers are doing anything 'wrong' - their job is to win cases.
It's an adversarial system, and they use everything they can within the realm of what the law permits to win their case, including [selectively choosing] the types of jurors they want in their cases.
PL: You touched briefly on implications that this study might have outside the courtroom, regarding decision making in the boardroom, where mostly financial matters are in question and issues of race aren't as obvious.
SS: We've done some follow up work, including with college students, [and] we've found similar types of results.
Essentially, students, including Tufts students, in racially diverse groups often pay more attention and process information more carefully than they would in more homogenous groups.
There are certainly differences between the legal system and elsewhere. Some of the general findings of the study have potential relevance.
The idea that one, the effects of diversity are not just things that occur because of the contributions of non-white individuals.
When people talk about racial diversity, they talk about it as a good thing, and typically they are saying that diversity is good because you have opinions brought to the table by minority groups whose voices are not often heard.
I think there is truth in that, but this study shows that in fact it is white people who behave differently in diverse versus non-diverse settings. I think that this has potential relevance to a variety of domains.
