Sometimes the influence process fails to produce a
critical mass of opinion, however, and the jury cannot
reach a verdict (i.e., it “hangs”), resulting in a mistrial.
In a classic early study in the 1950s, the frequency of
hung juries was found to be about 5%. More recent
work with samples of juries drawn from several large
metropolitan areas suggests that the frequency rate
varies considerably across jurisdictions and may be as
high as 15% to 20% in some places, although the
observed frequency rate depends on whether hanging
is defined at the level of the defendant as a whole or
the specific charge. A primary determinant of hanging
is the ambiguity of the evidence, with trials involving
moderately strong evidence producing initial prefer-
ence distributions without strong majorities. Small
minority factions—especially those composed of only
one individual—are rarely able to hold out.The Dynamics of
Monetary Award Decisions
Research on civil juries has increased dramatically
since the 1980s, but the study of how juries arrive at
damage awards is still in its infancy. Nonetheless,
experimental research using mock juries has estab-
lished a number of influences on both the likelihood
and the amount of compensatory damage awards,
including whether or not the trial is bifurcated (divided
into liability and award phases), the characteristics of
the two parties (e.g., the number of plaintiffs and the
variability of their injuries), trial complexity, the
explicit mention of “appropriate” damage awards by
the attorneys, and the actual severity of the plaintiff’s
injury. However, relatively little attention has been
devoted thus far to the issue of how juries arrive at a
specific figure, and at least three models are possible:
(1) juries begin with a salient benchmark figure explic-
itly identified by one party or the other during the trial
and modify it based on the content of the deliberation;
(2) juries break down the award into components,
assign dollar values to the various elements of the
claim through discussion, and then sum the component
values to achieve a total value; and (3) juries simply
choose an amount that seems appropriate in a holistic
fashion. Distinct from the issue of when these models
might apply is the question of whether they would be
executed by individual jurors, the jury as a whole, or
both in a mixed fashion. Research examining the rela-
tionship between the amounts preferred by individual
jurors and the collective jury award has shown that juryawards tend to be (a) larger than the central tendency
of their constituent individual members and (b) less
variable than individual award preferences (particu-
larly in 12-person juries as opposed to 6-person juries).
Related to the first point, some research suggests that
the median of the individual award preferences (as
opposed to the mean or mode) is the best predictor of
the actual collective award.Deliberation Quality
Much of the research on juries can be viewed as a
search for variables that influence the nature of
the verdicts observed (i.e., guilty vs. not guilty).
Relatively little attention has been directed at the
question of how welljuries deliberate and the extent to
which this influences the nature of their decision, but
several notable empirical findings bear on the issue.
First, considerable research on the impact of jury size
and assigned decision rule (e.g., unanimous, critical
majority, simple majority) has generally shown these
procedural variables to have little influence on verdict
distributions. However, larger juries and those required
to reach unanimity tend to take more time, generate a
greater exchange of information, produce more satis-
fied members, and show less variability in their dam-
age awards—all characteristics that might be taken to
indicate a higher quality of deliberation. Second, evi-
dence-driven deliberation styles tend to be associated
with longer deliberations, a more thorough examina-
tion of the evidence, and less normative influence. In
other words, juries that are larger, evidence driven,
and/or required to be unanimous may be more likely
to have higher-quality deliberations than smaller,
nonunanimous, and verdict-driven juries.
Another question related to the notion of deliberation
quality is whether the deliberation process amplifies or
suppresses the biases of individual jurors. An early,
well-known hypothesis was that the biases of individual
jurors would tend to manifest themselves when the evi-
dence was ambiguous and not clearly supporting any
verdict, but the empirical research has been mixed. In
some situations, deliberation seems to reduce the biases
of its members, but in other situations it appears to mag-
nify them. Most likely, there is no simple, straightfor-
ward answer to this question—whether deliberation
accentuates or attenuates individual bias probably
depends on the strength of the evidence as well as how
that bias is distributed across jurors (and particularly
whether it is concentrated in an early majority).Jury Deliberation——— 411J-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:43 PM Page 411