Describe Reid Hastie and Nancy Pennington's story model of individual jurors' decision-making.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers may vary.An influential model of individual jurors' decision-making is the story model, developed by psychologists Reid Hastie and Nancy Pennington. They chose the name story model because they suspected that the core cognitive process involved in juror decision-making was construction of a story or narrative summary of the events in dispute.In many ways, the juror's task is like that of a mystery reader. The joy of reading a mystery comes from savoring each clue, combining it with prior clues, and evaluating its significance in the overall puzzle of who committed the crime. According to the story model, that is how most jurors operate. As they listen to the evidence, they form a schema, or mental structure that aids in the processing and interpretation of information. Just like mystery readers who remember clues that fit their hypothesis and forget clues that do not, jurors construct their own private stories about the evidence so that it makes sense to them; in the process, they pay inordinate attention to certain pieces of evidence while ignoring others. Good lawyers know this. In fact, really great lawyers know that an important task is to convince the jury that their story, and not their opponent's story, is the right one. Famed criminal defense attorney "Racehouse" Haynes once said, "The lawyer with the best story wins."According to the model, jurors actively construct stories by considering three sources of information: the evidence presented during the trial, their personal experience in similar situations, and their broad knowledge of the elements of a story. After jurors learn about the verdict options in the case, they map their story onto the verdict options and determine which verdict fits best with their constructed story.