Let’s Get Prototypical: The Role of Complainant/Defendant Gender and Form of Sexual Act on Mock Jurors’ Decisions in Sexual Assault Trials
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This mock juror study (N = 437) serves as a first examination of mock jurors' perceived prototypicality of a sexual assault case, complainant, and defendant in various conditions, to ascertain if mock jurors' sexual assault prototypes are one of the mechanisms behind their caserelated decisions. To this end, the present study offers an initial examination of the impact of the form of alleged sexual assault (forced oral sex onto the complainant vs. forced vaginal intercourse) and complainant and defendant gender (i.e., male complainant-female defendant vs. female complainant-male defendant) on mock jurors' sexual assault prototypes and, in turn, their assessments and decisions. The results of a path analysis demonstrate a cautious optimism that the form of sexual assault does not play a significant role in mock jurors' decisions. However, the complainant's gender (tied to defendant's gender) does. Mock jurors perceived the male complainant-female defendant condition as less prototypical of a sexual assault case, complainant, and defendant than the female complainant-male defendant condition, resulting in negative evaluations of the male complainant and favourable evaluations of the female defendant, which lowered mock jurors' probability of rendering a guilty verdict. Simultaneously, the present study suggests that for fixed levels of prototypicality, the female complainant received heightened negative evaluations from mock jurors, and the male defendant received more favourable evaluations from mock jurors, which lowered mock jurors' probability of rendering a guilty verdict. Collectively, these results provide evidence to suggests that prototypicality is one of the mechanisms behind mock juror decisions in sexual assault cases. My results reveal a potential bias in our legal system that should be furthered researched and mitigated to ensure fairer decisions for the 37,855 sexual assault trials held in Canada each year (Statistics Canada, 2019).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".