The Judgments of College Students and Jurors Concerning Sanity and Guilt of an Alleged Murderer

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Abstract
Critics of behavioral research have often argued that studies using college students as Ss suggest conclusions that may be inapplicable to the population at large. The present study investigated this bias by comparing juridic judgments of college students with those of actual veniremen. In part one of the investigation, 160 persons who had just completed duty as trial jurors for a county court were individually presented with a brief written account of a murder trial. Each also received supplementary written information about testimony, systematically varied according to professional training of the expert witness, type of testimony given, and the conclusion stated by the expert. The Ss then estimated, on four-point scales, their probable verdict and opinion on the defendant's legal sanity. These same procedures were repeated with the use of 160 undergraduate college students. The results show that the students were consistently more lenient than jurors in the determination of sanity and verdict.

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