Hidden Bias and Fair Trials

You may serve on a jury one day, and if you do, your thought process will mean a lot to the people involved.

Those people, and the system as a whole, will rely on you to give them a fair trial.

To that end, one court has created a video to help potential jurors understand their hidden biases. These are the mental shortcuts we use to make decisions about people or things. We all have them, and they help us make sense of the world around us. We all have them because we’re all human, and we often don’t even realize it.

The thing is, they’re often wrong. For example, one study looked at scientists who were hiring a laboratory manager. The experiment was that all of them were given the exact same resume to review except some copies bore a man’s name and others a woman’s name. Well, guess what? Both male and female scientists scored the male candidate as more competent and worthy of the job even though the resumes were exactly the same. Without realizing it, these scientists harbored a hidden bias about gender, and it clouded their judgment.

The video is shown during jury selection in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. It features three people: the top federal prosecutor for the district, a senior trial judge there, and a prominent defense lawyer. The lawyer explains the value of talking about hidden bias this way:

“You have two choices: either talk about it or don’t talk about it, and haven’t we seen what happens when we don’t talk about it?”

The upside is that by taking the time to really think about things, and by taking in more information, we all make better decisions.