Inferring models of opinion dynamics from aggregated jury data.

ABSTRACT: Jury deliberations provide a quintessential example of collective decision-making, but few studies have probed the available data to explore how juries reach verdicts. We examine how features of jury dynamics can be better understood from the joint distribution of final votes and deliberation time. To do this, we fit several different decision-making models to jury datasets from different places and times. In our best-fit model, jurors influence each other and have an increasing tendency to stick to their opinion of the defendant's guilt or innocence. We also show that this model can explain spikes in mean deliberation times when juries are hung, sub-linear scaling between mean deliberation times and trial duration, and unexpected final vote and deliberation time distributions. Our finding

SUBMITTER: Burghardt K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6602184 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature