ABSTRACT
Actors within the legal system are expected to be objective and without bias. Although biases have been documented in all sorts of legal decisions, scholars have neglected the role that social interactions may have on biasing legal outcomes, in part because they favor paradigms in which participants are passive recipients of information on which they base their decisions. In contrast, newer paradigms, which provide opportunities for participants to interact as they would in natural settings, allow for an examination of how the expectancies of legal actors influence their interactions in criminal justice settings, consequently influencing legal decisions. In one stream of research, attorneys’ expectations about potential jurors’ attitudes influenced the questions they asked during jury selection, their assessments of their attitudes after questioning, and consequently the verdicts that jurors rendered. In another stream of research, the expectancies of lineup administrators interacting with witnesses caused the administrators to emit suggestive behaviors that increased witness identifications of suspects, resulting in an increase in mistaken identifications when the suspect was innocent. In sum, social interactions in these legal settings introduced bias into legal decision-making through the expectancies of others.
