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The impact of legal instruction complexity and context on mock jurors' judgments of obscenity
Abstract
This article reviews five studies on the impact of legal instructions and the psychological framing theory on individual and group decisions of obscenity. In the final study subjects were randomly assigned to one of four conditions. Depending on the condition, subjects received either socially acceptable (i.e., art and photography magazines) or socially unacceptable sources (i.e., material seized in a police raid). The subjects viewed 6 randomly ordered slides for thirty seconds each and rated them on a bi-polar 7-point scale for obscenity. Next the subjects received the substantive legal test for obscenity. Depending on the condition subjects received the standard difficult obscenity instructions or a simplified version of the instructions. The subjects then had to individually apply the legal test to each slide and answer 4 questions corresponding to the parts of the test. Next the subjects were asked to deliberate as a group on the question of obscenity for each slide. Results indicate that source of the material did not have an impact on subjects' ratings. Hence mock jurors were not focusing on where the materials came from or who the defendant was when determining obscenity. It is suggested that subjects were anchoring their ratings on the community standard in the legal test rather than on the source. Instruction complexity had an impact with those in the simplified instruction condition rating the slides as less obscene than those with the difficult instructions. In addition, those in the simplified instruction condition were better able to answer the legal questions in a logically consistent manner than those in the hard instruction condition. Group deliberation improved subjects' application of the legal test when using the simplified instructions but not when using the difficult instructions. Recommendations for simplifying obscenity instructions and future research are discussed.
Subject Area
Social psychology|Law
Recommended Citation
Larson, Michelle L, "The impact of legal instruction complexity and context on mock jurors' judgments of obscenity" (1995). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9604422.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9604422