Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Public Behavior and Compliance: Evidence from Jury Duty

    I was summoned for jury duty today, something that’s never happened to me before. Juries are interesting to social scientists because–at least at the summons stage–they are the closest thing that you get to a random sample of the people who live in your community. Jury duty in Tompkins County gave me a good snapshot of my fellow Tompkins County residents. 60 of us showed up. Out of those 60, they picked 14 at random for voir dire (this didn’t include me). Of those 14,

    • 13 were Caucasian
    • 1 was unemployed
    • 1 was a college professor (assistant prof at Ithaca College)
    • 5 lived in Ithaca, 2 lived in Newfield, 2 in T-burg
    • 7 were men
    • 8 were obviously liberal/progressive/etc.
    • 1 was obviously conservative

    So it sounds about right. But what interested me about this was a little natural experiment that I was able to observe about public behavior and social compliance among this nice random sample of jurors.

    So, some background. First off, let’s recognize that almost everyone wants to get out of jury duty. This was clear from the very beginning: in New York State, the first thing that happens when the jury pool shows up is the judge describes the case in a sentence or so (in our case, “Plaintiff X is suing defendant Y for negligence in eye surgery.” That’s literally all we heard). Then, the potential jurors are given the opportunity to come speak privately to the judge about why they believe that they should be excused from jury duty based on the identity of the plaintiff and defendant and the nature of the case. Well, when the judge announced this, I’d say that 55/60 people got in line to get off of jury duty. (Again, this did not include me.)

    Clearly, people just didn’t want to serve on the jury. And it turns out that due to the acoustics of the place, everyone could hear the private conversations between the jury pool and the judge. Things like “I have glasses so I couldn’t rule fairly on this case” or “my son has a soccer game next week and I don’t want to miss it.” Basically, the lamest excuses that you could imagine. To his credit, the judge only excused two candidates, both of whom were current patients of the doctor who were scheduled for eye surgery.

    What I conclude from this is that people want to get out of jury duty and they will offer incredibly tendentious excuses if they think that will work.

    So then, the clerk randomly chose 14 of the 60 of us for voir dire. What this meant is that all of us had to sit there while the two lawyers grilled these 14 for four hours. These questions went pretty deep. And critically, the questions and the responses were public, and very focused on each potential juror. So the lawyer would ask, “do you believe that a plaintiff has a right to a jury trial?” and “could you put own personal experiences aside to judge this case fairly?” Of the 14 potential jurors chosen, and the hundreds of questions put to them, every answer was what I would call “socially compliant,” by which I mean the juror responded in a way that made him or her seem fair, impartial, and competent. Not a single potential juror admitted, for example, that his or her family’s history of difficult relations with doctors would cloud his or her judgment.

    So, we have the observation that the same people who five minutes previously had tried their best to get out of jury duty were adamant that they would be completely fair and impartial jurors, even though even the slightest hint of partiality or bias would get them dismissed–excusing them from jury duty–immediately.

    It’s costless to tell a lawyer that you might not be completely impartial, and in fact it would be beneficial to do so if the goal is to get out of jury duty! We know that nearly all of these folks wanted out of jury duty. Yet when asked publicly if they were able to abide by the rules of the court, not one was willing to say that s/he could not, despite the obvious incentives to do so.

    (Full disclosure, I would have told the lawyers that I would have a tough time ruling in favor of a plaintiff in a malpractice suit given how much I talk about medical malpractice with my doctor in-laws.)

    So what’s the difference? I think that the reason why potential jurors were so willing to offer bogus excuses to get out of jury duty to the judge was that doing so was private, and faced no implicit social sanction. When given the same opportunity in front of their peers and when questioned by an authority figure, they would not do so. This resonates, I think, with a long line of research that shows that people will do lots of pretty shady things when they think that no one is listening or watching, but that they are remarkably compliant to instructions when they fear some sort of sanction from their peers and/or an authority figure.

  • Three Arguments That Affected Me

    Via Scott Wolford, I come across this interesting time waster question about what three arguments or concepts have had the most impact on me as a political scientist.

    Q: Of all the arguments/findings/concepts you’ve learned in political science, which one has had the greatest impact on how you think about the world in your daily life?

    I’ll go with the concept of the counterfactual, embedded within the broader Neyman-Rubin causal model. There is hardly an hour that goes by without me thinking about some sort of counterfactual thought experiment to interpret some aspect of current events. Did the stimulus work? You can’t hope to answer that without some sort of counterfactual hypothesis of what the U.S. economy would have looked like without the stimulus. It seems so obvious when you lay it out that way, but we know for sure that most people don’t think in terms of counterfactual thought experiments when forming opinions. Just ask most critics of the stimulus.

    As an extension, most critiques of naive counterfactual reasoning (treatment versus selection, endogeneity, extreme counterfactuals, etc.) are just as foundational for how I think. I had an argument not one hour ago with my father-in-law about whether we should think that the action of kicking a soccer ball has a “handedness” in the same way that throwing a baseball or writing does. He appealed to the fact that most right-hand throwers are right-foot kickers, and my first response was to wonder “treatment versus selection???”

    Q: Of all the arguments/findings/concepts you’ve learned in political science, which one has had the greatest impact on your own research?

    Here are two ideas that are different, but both have affected my work in the same way: The Riker Objection and Polanyi’s Embeddedness. The Riker Objection refers to William Riker’s critique of institutional analysis in which a scholar takes institutions as exogenous and then looks for their effects on behavior or outcomes. Riker’s point was that political institutions are themselves always and everywhere the outcomes of political conflict. So they are very likely shaped by the same factors that shape the outcomes that they are supposed to explain. So, to take a made-up example, the weakness of civil society in country A might explain why there is a strong executive in country A, and it might also explain why that executive can enact illiberal policies. For Riker, we shouldn’t simply infer from that that strong executives cause illiberal policies. You need to start with the weakness of civil society. (Bracket for now the idea that illiberal policies or strong executives might themselves weaken civil society–see, here’s that counterfactual thinking coming back at me.)

    Embeddedness is, on its face, very different: it refers to the idea that all forms of economic relations cannot be understood outside of the broader social and political context in which they are formed. Karl Polanyi raised this to explain the formation of modern market economies, which, he argued, only could emerge in the context of the modern state. Market economies are socially dislocating, and you need the modern state to manage that kind of dislocation. The point for Polanyi is that you cannot separate economic exchange from social context and political power.

    I’m not saying that Polanyi or Riker were “correct.” I’m saying that these insights, taken together, are critical for how I do research. From Riker, I am always suspicious that “political institutions” are the most important factors that explain any outcome that political scientists care about. (As an extension, I’m deeply skeptical in most forms of institutional engineering.) Instead, from Polanyi, I take the insight that we need to care instead about the social and economic structure that surround the strategic behavior of voters, peasants, elites, groups, classes, etc.

    Q: Of all the arguments/findings/concepts you’ve learned in political science, which one did you most underestimate at first?

    There’s a lot of stuff that’s more profound than I originally had anticipated (after all, I’m not that profound). Forced to choose…I would say methodological individualism. This is a concept which goes, if I’m not mistaken, back to Jeremy Bentham, and holds that the basis for any explanation for any social phenomenon must start with the individual and his/her motivations. “Classes” and “societies” or “countries” and other collectives do not have agency. They do not act. We (scholars and citizens alike) impute agency to collectives such as these as a short-hand for the more complex and difficult to observe interactions of large numbers of individuals.

    To me, this idea holds an intuitive appeal. I am a methodological individualist. But I routinely underestimate the challenges of adhering to this standard in my work. A strict methodological individualism would render most theories that I work with intractable. It is awfully hard to develop testable hypotheses about the things that most political scientists care about–revolutions, economic crises, ethnic conflict–when you insist that your explanation be derived from the individual and his/her beliefs and motivations. The discipline that has gone the furthest in applying a strict methodological individualism is economics. Doing so has consumed the majority of the past five decades of economic research, with what I would call mixed results.

     

    Altogether, some interesting food for thought.