Seeing Through the Scan: The Impact of fMRI Evidence on Juror Satisfaction and Verdicts

Overview

The areas of the brain that become active when someone formulates a lie, or “deceit patterns”, are denoted on fMRI scans, yielding results that are more accurate than the polygraph. Using publicly available court records and fMRI results obtained from previous literature, the extent to which fMRI scan evidence influences juror judgment, average confidence levels, perceived strength of argument, and verdict counts between participants serving as mock jurors in a mock trial exposed to fMRI scan evidence and those not exposed to it were compared. Analysis of these metrics revealed that a mock juror’s exposure to fMRI evidence increases their perceived strength of the argument for the side consistent with their verdict and drastically changes the distribution of guilty versus not guilty verdicts. The difference in confidence levels between mock jurors in the control and experimental groups was not found to be statistically significant, however future research with a larger sample size may verify the current trend that exposure to fMRI evidence increases juror confidence in their verdict. Although fMRI scan evidence possesses the potential to revolutionize the way juries lend weight to pieces of evidence, because it was found to cause such significant shifts in juror decision making, court judges should caution its admission into evidence or further scrutinize its credibility during evidentiary suppression hearings until it is deemed generally acceptable by the scientific community.

Awards (1)

• American Psychological Association: Honorable Mention

Competition history

• ISEF 2021 Behavioral and Social Sciences · Entry BEHA057

Resources

• ISEF abstract page ↗

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