Concerns over wrongful convictions have spurred an increased focus on understanding criminal justice decision-making. This study describes an experimental approach that complements conventional mock-juror experiments and case studies by providing a rapid, high-throughput screen for identifying preconceptions and biases that can influence how jurors and lawyers evaluate evidence in criminal cases. The approach combines an experimental decision task derived from marketing research with statistical modeling to explore how subjects evaluate the strength of the case against a defendant. The results show that, in the absence of explicit information about potential error rates or objective reliability, subjects tend to overweight widely used types of forensic evidence, but give much less weight than expected to a defendant's criminal history. Notably, for mock jurors, the type of crime also biases their confidence in guilt independent of the evidence. This bias is positively correlated with the seriousness of the crime. For practicing prosecutors and other lawyers, the crime-type bias is much smaller, yet still correlates with the seriousness of the crime.

中文翻译：

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模拟犯罪类型和证据对有罪判断的影响。

对错误定罪的担忧促使人们更加关注理解刑事司法决策。本研究描述了一种实验方法，通过提供快速、高通量的筛选来识别可能影响陪审员和律师评估刑事案件证据的先入之见和偏见，从而补充传统的模拟陪审员实验和案例研究。该方法将来自市场研究的实验决策任务与统计模型结合起来，探索受试者如何评估针对被告的案件的强度。结果表明，在缺乏有关潜在错误率或客观可靠性的明确信息的情况下，受试者往往会过度重视广泛使用的法医证据类型，但对被告犯罪历史的重视程度却远低于预期。值得注意的是，对于模拟陪审员来说，犯罪类型也会影响他们对有罪的信心，而与证据无关。这种偏见与犯罪的严重性呈正相关。对于执业检察官和其他律师来说，犯罪类型偏见要小得多，但仍然与犯罪的严重性相关。