Objection! Perspective-taking in the court: How juror's instructions affect empathy, culpability, and verdict decisions

Perspective-taking is the study of how individuals imagine another person feels in a given situation. Prior research has shown that taking the perspective of another person increases feelings of empathy for that person, greater feelings of altruism, and a desire to reduce their suffering. The current research examines how three different instructions to jurors, perspective-taking, objective-focus, or no manipulation control affect judgments of empathy, culpability for a crime, and guilty or not guilty verdicts. A pilot study using a college student sample and a main study using an online sample from Prolific.com aimed to answer whether perspective-taking increased empathy, and decreased ratings of culpability and guilty verdicts for the crime. It was hypothesized that objective-focus instructions would decrease empathy and increase ratings of culpability and guilty verdicts. Finally, it was hypothesized that participants in the no manipulation control condition’s ratings would fall in the middle of those in the perspective-taking and objective-focus conditions. In line with the literature, the main study revealed that empathy was greater in the perspective-taking condition than in the objective-focus condition, but not greater than in the control condition. The data also revealed no direct effects of instruction type on culpability or verdict. Similar to a previous study, empathy and culpability mediated the relationship between condition type and verdict, meaning that individuals who were asked to take the defendant’s perspective reported more empathy, which led to lower ratings of culpability for the crime. This, in turn, led to a higher probability of a not-guilty verdict. Overall, these results demonstrate that the wording of instructions affect juror cognition and change how individuals interpret different circumstances.