Racial Differences in Jury Behavior

The experiments reported by Ugwuegbu (1979) were simulated juror evaluations of a rape case. The racial identities of the victim and the defendant and the amount of evidence presented to the jurors were varied. A number of hypotheses were tested in this experiment, including the idea that a racially dissimilar defendant would be accorded more negative and harsher evaluation than a similar defendant, that interracial rape would be more punitively punished than interracial rape when the victim is the same race as the juror, and that with ambiguous evidence, the difference in punitiveness between racially similar and racially dissimilar defendants would be especially strong.

The subjects consisted of 256 white undergraduate students from introductory psychology courses at Midwestern University, and they were run in five different sessions of nearly equal numbers of males and females. The experimental conditions were run simultaneously i

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Some common words found in the essay are:
Midwestern University, , Macrae Shepherd, Landy Aronson, Social Psychology, Stephan Stephan, Amato PR, Ugwuegbu DC, JW Shepherd, Habla Ingles, social psychology, interracial rape, black subjects, 1979 juror-defendant similarity, rape punitively punished, victim influence, decisions journal, race defendant, journal applied, applied social, white defendant, criminal stereotypes mediate, interracial rape punitively, juror-defendant similarity, six seven hypotheses,
Approximate Word count = 859
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page)

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