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Dangerous Opinions: Perception of Violent Video Games on Jury Decision Making

The purpose of the study was to examine whether a potential juror would give harsher sentences to defendants based only on the manipulation of the defendant's personal hobby. This was investigated by manipulating the hobby through a hypothetical manslaughter scenario in a vignette. Participants were asked to answer questions pertaining to the defendant's guilt and potential sentencing. Results indicate that participants' sex, participants' authoritarianism, and defendant's hobby were significant factors. Significant interactions were found pertaining to whether the defendant should receive counseling across sex by violence and sex by avocation. These results are evidence that the use of jurors in the legal system is flawed and needs to be improved upon. Future research should examine an age distribution closer to the national mean, and the online setting should be replaced with an in person mock jury that will have more realistic group dynamic and higher ecological validity.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:honorstheses1990-2015-2580
Date01 May 2014
CreatorsJacobi, Brock
PublisherSTARS
Source SetsUniversity of Central Florida
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceHIM 1990-2015

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