Blind justice

Jurors in court cases may be more lenient on people they feel are physically attractive rather than on defendants who are less good looking psychologists have found.

The research by Dr Sandie Taylor and Megan Butcher from Bath Spa University will be presented at the British Psychological Society’s Annual Conference at University of York today, Wednesday 21 March 2007.

The study involved 96 participants, 48 white and 48 black, given a fictitious transcript of a ‘mugging’ with an attached photograph of the defendant. They were then asked to score the extent of guilt of the defendant on a 0 to10-point scale and give a verdict of guilty / not guilty. The transcript content remained constant but photos varied depending on condition participants were blindly allocated to. In some cases the defendants were attractive and in others not, in some they were white and in others not.

The study found that the "jurors" were less likely to find attractive defendants guilty and were more likely to find less attractive defendants guilty on the scale used. An interesting finding was that ethnicity had no effect on whether or not defendants were found guilty. However, unattractive black defendants who were found guilty were given harsher sentences than white ones irrespective of the ethnicity of the "juror."

Sandie Taylor said: "We set out to consider the influence of physical attractiveness and ethnicity of a defendant depicted in a photograph on mock jurors’ (who themselves were either white or black) decisions of verdict, extent of guilt and sentencing. Our findings confirm previous research on the effects of defendant characteristics, such as physical attractiveness, on the deliberations of jurors. Attractive defendants are, it seems, rated less harshly than ‘homely’ defendants, so perhaps justice isn’t blind after all."

Dr Taylor further added: "It is interesting that being an unattractive black defendant only had an impact on sentencing and not on jurors’ verdicts of guilt (of course in the real world jurors would not be making decisions about the sentence). I think, however, it is a positive finding that neither black nor white participants showed a bias towards their own ethnic group."

Ref: PR1199