Citation

Nikonova O, Ogloff JRP. Can. J. Behav. Sci. 2005; 37(1): 1-19.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, Canadian Psychological Association, Publisher Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1037/h0087241

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The present study examined the impact of a judicial warning, witness age, and the method of testimony presentation on mock jurors' perceptions of credibility of witnesses and accused, and on guilty verdicts. The participants were 435 undergraduate university students who listened to an audio-taped summary of a theft trial followed by abbreviated instructions to the jury. Witness age was 7, 10, or 23, the jury warning was either present or absent when witnesses were children, and the testimony by the prosecution eyewitness and accused were either presented or summarized. For the taped testimony conditions, the mock witnesses and the accused read a fact pattern describing the events in the case and were audiotaped as they answered a series of questions, which constituted direct and cross-examination. The testimony of the 7-year-old child, compared to the 10-year-old, was associated with lower cognitive competence and higher suggestibility, but also with higher accuracy of recall (lower mistaken recollection) and lower credibility of accused. The pattern of results for appraisal of the older child was more similar to that of an adult witness. The young adult was judged to be less trustworthy than children of either age. While the presence of a warning had no impact on guilty verdicts when a 7-year-old was a witness, there were fewer guilty verdicts when a witness was 10 years old. Participants also made fewer guilty verdicts when a young adult's testimony, compared to conditions involving child witnesses, was presented, but not when it was summarized. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Keywords

Adjudication; Adult Attitudes; Age Differences; Credibility; Guilt; Juries; Legal Testimony; Witnesses