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Despite the empirical success of Terror Management Theory (TMT) and the possibility that capital jurors may be unable to escape mortality salience effects, no studies have applied TMT to capital punishment trials. This research asked mock jurors to focus on their own death, the victim's death, or the defendant's death while reviewing a capital trial. Mock jurors who focused on the victim's or defendant's death (but not their own death) relied more on their attitudes toward the death penalty to make sentencing decisions than did other participants. These results raise questions about the usefulness of TMT in understanding capital jury decision making.

This article distinguishes generic prejudice, prejudgments about classes of cases and defendants, from other forms of juror bias that undermine the impartiality principle of the Constitution. It develops an experimental method to study 2 types of generic prejudice (biases based upon specific charges, and biases based upon crime categories) and tests the role of cognitive resource theory and simple attention models in explaining when generic prejudice is most likely to be a threat to jury decisions. Results of 2 experiments using undergraduate research participants as mock jurors demonstrate that generic prejudice is more likely to be found in sexual assault cases relative to homicide cases, but that general adjudicative bias favoring the prosecution or the defense across crime categories is more likely to be found in homicide cases. There was some support for cognitive resource theory as an explanation for evaluations in sexual assault cases, and simple attention models for evaluations in homicide cases.

Social psychologists and cognitive psychologists have recently argued that human judgment is based on content-rich and context-bound knowledge structures such as schemas, prototypes, and scripts rather than criterial attributes of categories or universally-applicable dimensions. We argue that causal attributions should be treated as an aspect of content-specific schemas or categories rather than as points in a content-free dimensional framework. Analyses of judgments by expert parole decision makers indicate that a categorical coding of causal attributions is significantly more predictive of willingness to grant parole, prognoses for rehabilitation, and risk of future crime than is a dimensional coding. Further, these categorical attributions are more strongly predicted by case information than are ratings on attributional dimensions. The advantages of considering attribution processes within more general theories of human judgment are discussed.

An analogy was borrowed from the law to develop a legal model of the attribution of responsibility for rape. According to the model, judgments of physical and psychological causality of an alleged rapist are combined into overall evaluations of attacker responsibility. An experimental test of the model was conducted with college students. Results showed that witness identification information influenced judgments of physical causality (i.e., extent to which the situation was perceived as rape), and information about the relationship between the alleged attacker and victim influenced judgments of psychological causality (i.e., intention to rape). Judgments of physical and psychological causality interacted significantly with overall attributions of attacker responsibility.

Participants read standard informed consent statements. Half of the participants, the prebriefed group, read statements alerting them to the possibility that they might be intentionally misinformed. All participants then read a series of arguments summarizing the transcripts of an actual rape trial and rated the extent of defendant and complainant responsabilites. Half of the participants were misinformed concerning the correct outcome of the trial. Although the defendant was actually convicted, half of the participants were told before they read the summaries that the verdict was guilty, and half were told that it was not guilty. Attributions of responsibility and evaluations of culpability were compared to measure the effects of prebriefing. Effects found for the verdict manipulation were unaffected by the prebriefing information.