Term of Award

Fall 2025

Degree Name

Master of Science in Experimental Psychology (M.S.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (open access)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of Psychology

Committee Chair

Amy Hackney

Committee Member 1

Logan Somers

Committee Member 2

Michael Nielsen

Abstract

Since the Supreme Court case Graham v. Connor, police officers charged with misusing force on duty are judged against a hypothetical reasonable officer. Graham focuses on split-second decisions police officers must make and states police should not be judged with the benefit of hindsight. California goes beyond the subjective language of Graham and instructs jurors to look at the totality of circumstances, meaning they must consider all events and actions of an officer and citizen when assessing cases. The current study investigated whether type of instruction (Graham vs. California) affected mock jurors’ verdicts. Participants in the California condition were predicted to be more confident in a guilty verdict compared to the Graham condition. Higher levels of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and conservatism were predicted to correlate with less confidence in guilt. Exploratory analyses examined whether jury instructions moderated the relationship between political ideology, SDO, perspective-taking, or verdict. Data from 102 participants were analyzed. No hypotheses were supported; type of instructions did not affect verdicts, with 87% of participants finding the officer guilty; conservatism and SDO were unrelated to verdicts. The exploratory analyses found that increased perspective-taking related to the officer’s use of force was associated with decreased confidence in guilt, but only with Graham instructions. Use of force perspective-taking was unrelated to confidence in guilt under California instructions. This may have been the result of the more subjective wording of Graham instructions, suggesting that California instructions may reduce subjective judgments in cases involving a police officer’s deadly use of force.

OCLC Number

1520497541

Research Data and Supplementary Material

No

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