"Mock" Mock Juries: A Field Experiment on the Ecological Validity of Jury Simulations‪.‬

I. INTRODUCTION In an effort to provide insight for legal and public policy decisionmaking, jury researchers conduct jury simulation experiments because they can be performed in a repeatable and scientific manner, whereas systematic studies of juror behavior are difficult to conduct in situ. (1) Researchers who conduct empirical studies of how juries deliberate have long been aware of questions concerning the extent to which observations of mock juries' behavior can be generalized to the behavior of the real-world juries that they ostensibly simulate. (2) Because all simulations are merely models of real-world phenomena, the degree of similarity between a model and its real-world counterpart affects the extent that behavior observed in the model can be presumed to "occur in the world as it is." (3) Some jury experiments seek to replicate real-world conditions as closely as possible, for example, by showing jurors a video of a full-blown trial acted out using professional actors, (4) whereas other studies simply present participants with brief written summaries of the trial evidence. (5) Social science researchers use the term ecological validity to describe the degree of similarity between the conditions of a simulation experiment and the real-world phenomenon that the experiment is designed to model. (6) Understanding the extent to which such simulation experiments are ecologically valid becomes a critical concern when policy decisions are based on the results of such experiments. (7)