Racial diversity in a group discussion leads to more thorough decision-making processes, according to a recent study by Samuel Sommers, an assistant professor of psychology at Tufts University.
Sommers designed an experiment in which 29 six-person mock juries, of which 14 were all-white and 15 were mixed-race, watched a videotape of a trial of a black man accused of injuring white victims. The jury members cast initial votes over the guilt of the defendant before deliberating in their group. Each jury eventually decided whether to convict or acquit the defendant, or else remained hung.
Though the final decisions of the all-white and mixed-race juries were similar, the voting attitudes of white participants changed when they were part of a diverse jury. Just over half of the white participants on all-white juries voted to convict the defendant, compared to only 34 percent of the white participants in diverse juries.
Sommers, who is white, attributed the trend not to the alternative perspectives that black jurors introduced to juries, but rather to white jurors' increased will not to appear racist.
"A lot of differences result from white jurors acting very differently in a diverse setting," he said. "Diversity serves as a reminder for white people that they want to be fair and objective."
More important than the actual votes, Sommers said, was the content of the deliberations of the all-white and mixed-race juries.
"The most interesting results had to do with the ways in which the discussions in the two groups were different," he said. Sommers explained that the diverse juries tended to deliberate for a longer period of time before reaching a decision. He attributed the increased duration to more thorough discussions of the case, pointing out that factual inaccuracies were more likely to be challenged and corrected by diverse juries.
Though he was reluctant to prescribe diversity as a miracle cure to improve all group decision-making, Sommers was enthusiastic about his results.
"Saying a decision is 'better' is hard ... but our diverse juries were more thorough and more accurate, more open-minded to discussing racial issues than the all-white juries," he said.
Joachim Krueger, associate professor of psychology at Brown, wrote in an e-mail to The Herald that few concrete conclusions could be drawn from Sommers' study. Krueger wrote that Sommers' findings provided "a good review of the conflicting findings of the recent past" but added he is unsure how much can be read into the results.
"Because the final outcomes did not differ, I think Sommers makes too much of the differences in deliberation content," Krueger wrote.
Sommers said he believes the results of his experiment could eventually lead to changes in the way people form groups to make decisions, both in the legal system and outside.
"There are implications for society more broadly. Whether it's a discussion in a classroom or a boardroom, it's a reasonable hypothesis that diversity has an effect," Sommers said.
He acknowledged that his study was neither perfectly flawless nor complete. The mock juries included, for example, only black and white members; no other races or ethnicities were represented. Therefore, the study could not observe the broader effects of diversity based on race, nor could it observe the effects of diversity based on age, gender or socioeconomic class.
In Sommers' study, "there is no all-white jury judging a white defendant, and there is no all-black jury judging a black or a white defendant," Krueger wrote. "In experimental research it is important to provide comparisons in order to make sense of the judgments seen for the most interesting cases."
For now, Sommers said he hopes only that his findings will help improve the fairness of the justice system.
"Anything that makes a jury less diverse should be remedied," he said. Sommers also stressed that the benefits of diversity extended to white participants because the introduction of diversity changed their behavior extensively.
"Diversity seems to affect everyone in the group, not just the racial minority," Sommers said.
