of the Purdue study and in the context of other research on the effects
of imposed restraints, one must wonder whether official censorship as
a means may not be antithetical to the goal. If we are to believe the im-
plications of the research, then the censorship is likely to increase the
desire of students for sexual material and, consequently, to cause them
to view themselves as the kind of individuals who like such material.
The term “official censorship” usually makes us think of bans on
political or sexual material; yet there is another common sort of official
censorship that we don’t think of in the same way, probably because it
occurs after the fact. Often in a jury trial, a piece of evidence or testimony
will be introduced, only to be ruled inadmissi-ble by the presiding
judge, who may then admonish the jurors to disregard that evidence.
From this perspective, the judge may be viewed as a censor, though
the form of censorship is odd. The presentation of the information to
the jury is not banned—it’s too late for that—it’s the jury’s use of the
information that is banned. How effective are such instructions from a
judge? And is it possible that, for jury members who feel it is their right
to consider all the available information, declarations of inadmissibility
may actually cause psychological reactance, leading the jurors to use
the evidence to a greater extent?
These were some of the questions asked in a large-scale jury-research
project conducted by the University of Chicago Law School. One reason
the results of the Chicago jury project are informative is that the parti-
cipants were individuals who were actually on jury duty at the time
and who agreed to be members of “experimental juries” formed by the
researchers. These experimental juries then heard tapes of evidence
from previous trials and deliberated as if they were deciding the case.
In the study most relevant to our interest in official censorship, thirty
such juries heard the case of a woman who was injured by a car driven
by a careless male defendant. The first finding of the study was no
surprise: When the driver said he had liability insurance, the jurors
awarded his victim an average of four thousand dollars more than when
he said he had no insurance (thirty-seven thousand dollars vs. thirty-
three thousand dollars). Thus, as insurance companies have long sus-
pected, juries make larger awards to victims if an insurance company
will have to pay. The second finding of the study is the fascinating one,
though. If the driver said he was insured and the judge ruled that
evidence inadmissible (directing the jury to disregard it), the instruction
to disregard had a boomerang effect, causing an average award of forty-
six thousand dollars. So when certain juries learned that the driver was
insured, they increased the damage payment by four thousand dollars.
But when other juries were told officially that they must not use that
information, they used it still more, increasing the damage payment by
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 191