Moral intuitions and jury decision-making

Researchers have developed two theories of how individuals engage in moral judgments – rationalists hypothesize that moral judgments are the outcome of explicit cognitive reasoning, whereas intuitionists posit that they are automatic, involuntary, and culturally-driven.  Chief among intuitionist models is moral foundations theory, which proposes five moral foundations that are culturally-invariant and operate beneath conscious awareness (Haidt & Graham, 2007).
Across four experiments, we investigate the role of moral foundations in prospective jurors’ deliberations and verdict justifications in simulated criminal trials.  Using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) software, we coded jurors’ deliberations (in group studies) and verdict justifications (in individual studies) for words related to each of the five moral foundations and conducted a follow-up sentiment analysis.  Our results reveal that jurors who reach different verdicts employ moral foundations differently in their reasoning.  Sentiment analysis further suggests that use of anger-related language is associated with greater likelihood of a guilty verdict.