Encyclopedia of Psychology and Law

knowledge. For example, an episode may consist of ini-

tiating events that led the defendant to a certain mental

state, which then led the defendant to create goals or to

have certain motivations, which then resulted in the

defendant acting in a particular way. Jurors may get

some of the information to complete the episode from

trial evidence and may have to infer some of the episode

elements based on their knowledge of the world.

Episodes are hierarchically organized, in that each com-

ponent of any given episode may be broken down into

its own individual episode. The highest level episodes

are the most important in explaining the actions that

occurred; thus, the story model accounts for the weight

jurors assign to different pieces of evidence.

One of the greatest strengths of the story model is

that it accounts for jurors’ unique experiences and indi-

cates when they add those unique experiences and

pieces of knowledge into the decision-making process.

Witnesses do not often have the opportunity to explain

why particular events happened or how they personally

reacted to a particular sequence of events. So, jurors fill

in those blanks with inferences based on their own per-

sonal knowledge of similar events. In addition, jurors’

expectations about what makes a complete story are

important to help them determine when important

pieces of information are missing or when an inference

about human behavior or how someone might act in a

particular situation needs to be made. Jurors then can

make this inference based on their personal knowledge.

The story model accounts for differences in stories

between jurors by accounting for the different world

experiences and expectations jurors bring to the story

construction process.

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Three certainty principles govern whether a juror

will find a particular story acceptable, and following

acceptability, how much confidence a juror will have

in a particular story. The first two—coverage and coher-

ence—contribute to whether a story will be accepted

and, if accepted, how much confidence the juror will

have in the story. The third principle, uniqueness, con-

tributes solely to the juror’s confidence in the story.

Coverage refers to the amount of evidence

accounted for by a particular story. The more coverage

a story has, the more likely the juror is to deem the story

acceptable and, if accepted, the more confidence the

juror will have in that story. Conversely, the less evi-

dence the story accounts for, the less likely it is to be

accepted by jurors. If accepted, jurors are likely to have

less confidence in the story compared with if the story

had a high level of coverage. If a story has low cover-

age and, therefore, the juror has a low amount of confi-

dence in the story, the juror would also have a low level

of confidence in the final decision based on that story.

The second principle is coherence. A story’s coher-

ence is determined by a combination of three variables:

consistency, plausibility, and completeness. To be con-

sistent, a story must contain no internal contradictions

or contradictions with pieces of evidence the juror

believes are true. To be plausible, the story constructed

must be similar to the juror’s knowledge of what typi-

cally happens in these situations. That is, a story must

not contradict the juror’s knowledge about the world in

general. Last, to be complete, the story must contain all

the parts of what a juror believes makes up a story. The

more consistent, plausible, and complete the story, the

higher the coherence of the story. If a story is deemed

coherent, the juror is more likely to think that the story

is an acceptable account of the events in question and

the more likely the juror is to be confident in the story.

The story model posits that jurors can construct

more than one story, but one story usually emerges as

the best explanation of events. However, what hap-

pens when jurors create more than one story and each

of the stories is high in both coverage and coherence?

According to the story model, this compromises the

last certainty principle, the uniqueness of the story. If

jurors construct more than one acceptable story, they

are less likely to believe either story, and the confi-

dence in both stories goes down.

Learning Verdict Options

In the second stage of the story model, jurors learn

which verdict options are available to them. Generally,

the different verdict options along with the definition

of what constitutes each verdict option are given to the

jurors in the judicial instructions at the end of the trial.

The combination of this one-trial learning task with the

difficulty of legal language makes this task difficult for

jurors. In fact, research has demonstrated that jurors

generally do not comprehend the majority of judicial

instructions presented to them. In addition, jurors also

have preconceived notions of what constitutes various

crimes. Those preconceived notions, accurate or inac-

curate, may interfere with jurors’ understandings of the

verdict options in the case.

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