Bias in the Court: How the Gender and Ethnicity of an Expert Witness Affect How Jurors Make Decisions

Abstract

This study addresses how manipulating the ethnicity and gender of the plaintiff expert witness in a court of law affects how a juror makes decisions. Previous research has found that expert testimony is found in the majority of civil cases in the United States and usually consists of extremely technical language that is difficult for the typical juror to understand. Because of this, jurors seem to rely on heuristic cues in order to make their decisions as they typically do not fully comprehend the expert testimony. Gender and ethnicity have shown to be heuristic cues that participants utilize in order to make decisions in court cases, especially when the expert testimony is difficult to understand. Results indicated the presence of an in-group bias effect for Hispanic participants, as they were more likely to call the defendant guilty when the plaintiff expert witness was Hispanic. However, this effect was not shown for the non-Hispanic participants, indicating the potential for a social desirability effect in order to seem less bias. These results further add to the research that jurors rely on other aspects of the expert witness, like gender, ethnicity, and the complexity of the testimony, to make decisions in civil court cases.