The Role of Complainant/Defendant Gender and Form of Sexual Assault on Jurors’ Perceptions of Prototypicality and Verdicts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We sought to test the effects of sexual assault form and complainant/defendant gender on jurors’ perceptions of the prototypicality of a sexual assault case, complainant, and defendant. We examined whether these perceived prototypicality measures predict mock jurors’ complainant/defendant blame and credibility assessments and if these assessments predict verdict decisions in a simulated sexual assault trial. We predicted that the female complainant–male defendant condition, vaginal intercourse condition, and their combination would be perceived as more prototypical than their counterparts, which would predict blame/credibility assessments, ultimately predicting verdict. Mock jurors ( N = 437) recruited via Prolific Academic read a trial transcript involving an alleged sexual assault (oral or vaginal sex forced onto the complainant) with a female complainant–male defendant or a male complainant–female defendant. They provided a verdict and assessed the perceived prototypicality of the case/complainant/defendant, provided blame/credibility assessments for the complainant/defendant, and responded to rape myth questionnaires. Sexual assault form did not significantly affect any of our outcomes. Mock jurors perceived the male complainant–female defendant condition as less prototypical of a sexual assault case/complainant/defendant than the female complainant–male defendant condition, resulting in negative evaluations of the complainant, favorable evaluations of the defendant, and lowered probability of conviction. Simultaneously, for fixed levels of prototypicality, the female complainant received more negative evaluations, and the male defendant received more favorable evaluations, which lowered the probability of conviction; mock jurors’ rape myth acceptance moderated this effect. Rape myths were predictive of decision-making in cases involving a female complainant, and male rape myths were predictive in cases involving a male complainant. Results demonstrate that prototypicality is a mechanism behind mock jurors’ decisions in sexual assault trials and elucidate the distinctive role of prototypes and rape myths on juror decision-making, with practical implications for the field of psychology and the criminal legal system.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".