

Jurors more likely to convict unattractive people - haidut
http://euraeka.com/articles/6010924-Jurors-more-likely-to-convict-unattractive-people

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Kepler2
Interesting, especially when you consider that programmers will often complain
when the subject of jury duty is brought up of being summoned for it only to
be excused during voir dire when their occupation is discovered. Apparently
attorneys prefer jurors they can easily emotionally manipulate. I suppose this
is what you get when you systematically exclude anyone with an analytical bent
and an IQ above 100 from jury participation: a group of twelve over-emotional,
intuition-driven fools who determine the fate of their fellow citizens using
the pseudoscience of physiognomy.

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sliverstorm
This has always seemed like the most fundamental flaw in the legal system.
Rejecting jurors should be much more limited, in my mind. Perhaps, for
example, give the attorney 3 sets of 12- or give him a set of 12, and offer
him the chance to reject the whole set, a limited number of times.

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grellas
Jurors go through a lot in performing what is a pretty thankless task, and I
would imagine that courts and legislatures will think long and hard before
adopting any system by which they add the further burden of making jurors
undergo psychological tests as a condition of being chosen. Such a system, if
used on a jury pool in any systematic way, would prove incredibly burdensome
because, as anyone who has served knows, the pool itself is many times larger
than the number selected. Even as it is today, jurors will sit around for a
whole day, or even for several days, undergoing the selection process - I
can't imagine what this would be like if they had to be individually tested
for their emotional qualities as well.

Perhaps this can work for exceptional cases only and be made subject to the
discretion of a judge in individual cases. Of course, if adopted for any case
on the ground that science requires it for fairness, then the failure to use
it in other cases may create due-process grounds for appeal whenever a
defendant is convicted without benefit of the full range of protections
available for the jury selection process.

My guess is that this study is too thin in itself to lead to changes in the
procedures, especially because of the practical burdens that would result if
its findings are accepted as established scientific fact. A lot more study
would be required before so fundamental a change would be made.

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ShabbyDoo
I think the idea of the psych tests was that they might be used as a tool for
the prosecution and defense to exclude members from the jury pool. Today,
potential jurors can be asked to fill out surveys with questions like, "Have
you ever been the victim of a violent crime?" So, asking "Do you make
decisions based on your emotions?" isn't too big of a step.

In the US judicial system, N potential jurors are made available to the
prosecution and defense, and each side takes a turn excluding a person until
the number of jurors required is reached. I think the idea is that those on
the ends of the normal distribution (in terms of biases relevant to the trial
at hand) will be removed so that the jury is more fair than if N jurors were
selected at random.

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heyrhett
Are unattractive people more likely to commit crimes?

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dkarl
Irrelevant. The relevant question is, are unattractive people on trial more
likely to be guilty?

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Alex3917
It's not irrelevant. The fact that unattractive people are more likely to be
found guilty doesn't mean anything without knowing whether or not they are
more likely to have committed the crime.

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sesqu
Grandparent wants to want to compare P(found guilty|unattractive) to P(found
guilty) to reason about whether attractiveness and the jury's finding are
independent.

You want to compare P(found guilty|unattractive,guilty) to P(found
guilty|guilty) to see the same while taking into account the desirable bias
against guilty people, which is of course more informative but has both
components unknown.

These arguments tend to crop up whenever someone notices dependence between
effects desired to be independent. The argument is then about where the the
dependence lies. The topic is always politically sensitive.

I favor the grandparent's position, since it's the simpler one (and actually
tractable). That doesn't mean it's right, and if someone's sufficiently
convinced otherwise, they can attempt to estimate the guilt of various
convicted (perhaps by waiting 50 years and looking for pardons). The results
would have to be extraordinarily convincing, however, and quite possibly they
would be harmful in that they would establish a genuine bias against
unattractive people, which was the original problem.

So this is a situation where the grandparent's position is better whether or
not it's right.

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tshtf
Original link:

[http://news.scotsman.com/world/Jurors-more-likely-to-
convict...](http://news.scotsman.com/world/Jurors-more-likely-to-
convict.6251840.jp)

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rbritton
Every single submission for euraeka.com is just a passthrough for the actual
article.

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lionhearted
Not surprising - attractive people get rated more highly in competency,
likability, trustworthiness, and all sorts of things by virtue of being
attractive. This happens in almost all fields, and the reverse happens too:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect>

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acangiano
Jurors are also more likely to convict men than women. And give them harsher
sentences for the same crimes.

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stavrianos
Men are more likely to have committed the crime. The harsher sentence still
sucks.

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_pius
This is utterly unsurprising.

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pan69
The whole juror system is insane. Let's get ten totally unqualified people to
judge a person on a theatrical performance by a lawyer.

It's like, "Hey, we're short on surgeons, can we introduce surgeon duty?
Everyone can cut meat right?".

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thribbler
Attractive people, on average, think less and are more sensitive to emotion
including conscience. This makes them more likely to be good and less likely
to be guilty of crime.

Thinking draws resources away from the body and thus indirectly affects things
like movement, grace and growth.

Hence the medieval law of combat: a good knight could not lose against a bad
knight.

Also the Emperor Palpatine's skin problems, ugly stepmothers in fairy tales,
etc.

Also George Orwell's comment "At age 50, every man has the face he deserves."

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mburney
Not sure why this comment was downvoted so much, it does a good job of
summarizing an ancient world view which goes against our current scientific
one. The ancient idea being that one's virtue is connected to one's vitality.

Topics like virtue, nobility, the body/soul have been misunderstood by modern
science; these problems can't be solved with empirical evidence + deductive
logic. The ancients thought about these things in a radically different way
from us because they accepted that higher-level values are a matter of
interpretation to be distinguished from lower-level factual (scientific)
things.

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hvasishth
I am curious why don't they keep the defendants and jury in a seperate room.
They can let the jury hear all the arguments etc. I suppose the voice would
still be a concern, but it should take care of the unattractive problem for
the most part.

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TheSOB88
Watching the person's movements and mannerisms is a very important part of
trust.

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known
Isn't 'attractiveness' relative?

