Juror decision-making models: The generalization gap

Evaluates psychological and mathematical models that have been applied to individual juror decision making and identifies 3 research goals: to gain insight into adult cognition in a complex, naturally occurring reasoning task, to extend existing psychological models of decision making and judgment, and to provide empirical data on questions of interest to the legal community. A task analysis is presented in the form of an ideal juror model to describe and evaluate empirical research with respect to these goals. Component processes proposed in each model and empirical findings are compared across models and in relation to the task analysis. Models examined include information integration, Bayesian, Poisson, sequential weighting, and nonmodels. It is concluded that laboratory model applications to actual complex reasoning tasks must be based on thorough task analyses to avoid conflict between research goals and to facilitate generalization to natural settings. (130 ref)