What Will You Learn During the Criminal Studies Course?

Study -

• criminal profiling
• criminal psychology
• legal terminology
• ethics
• forensics
• anger management
• anxiety management
• mental health
• And much more

This online, remote learning qualification provides you with a detailed knowledge of criminal behaviour, criminal profiling and crime scene investigation.

For example, you will learn more about Juror Attributes -

Juror Attributes

The characteristics of the juror can be significantly relevant to their decision-making.  A three-factor juror personality construct has revealed influential factors including:

• • Juror authoritarianism
• • Belief in internal or external locus of control
• • Belief in a just world.

Juror Authoritarianism 

Berg and Vidman looked at the degree of the juror’s authoritarianism on the severity of verdicts.  They found that high authoritarians were significantly more severe in their judgements than low authoritarians, especially when it came to low status defendants.   When they tested high authoritarian subjects, they found that these people tended to recall mainly information that was legally insignificant, but which was more concerned with the defendant’s characteristics.  

Juror Locus of Control  

Definitions 

External Locus of control is where a person believes that their behaviour is guided by fate, luck or other external circumstances, whilst the internal locus of control is where a person believes that their behaviour is controlled by their own efforts or decisions.

An example: Bill failed his statistics exam.

• • It was bad luck - I didn’t have time to revise and the woman next to me kept rustling her papers (external locus of control).
• • I didn’t have time to revise, because I didn’t organise myself well enough (internal locus of control).

Phares and Wilson investigated jurors’ beliefs about internal and external locus of control. They found that mock jurors with a high measure of internal control attributed more responsibility to defendants than jurors who scored high on measures of external control.  

Sosis argued that this is because of projection. Jurors project their own perceptions of responsibility on to their judgements of others.  

Belief in a Just World 

This concerns the idea that people believe we live in a world where people deserve what they get, and get what they deserve.  Lerner argued that under some circumstances innocent victims are blamed for their misfortunes, so that the observer can maintain their own ‘just world’ beliefs.  Auckerman and Gerbasi found that subjects who ranked high on a just world scale tended to hold ‘more respectable’ victims as being less responsible for the crimes committed AGAINST them, than they did for ‘less respectable’ victims.  For example, if a middle-class, obviously well-off man and a prostitute were both victims of the same crime, people who had a high ranking in just world would tend to see the prostitute as more deserving of being a victim of the crime than the middle class person. Therefore, they are basically blaming the prostitute for being a victim.  

In conclusion, the data shows that authoritarianism level, belief in internal or external locus of control, and belief in a just world can each influence jurors’ decision making processes. This may be to the extent that they ignore relevant information and focus on irrelevant information.

Guilt Bias 

Research has also shown that juror characteristics go beyond their own personality constructs to their previous experience in convictions.  Skolnick found that jurors with prior experience tend to show an increased disposition towards conviction. Skolnick argued that this is because jurors tended to believe that authorities only caught people who were guilty, thereby creating a ‘guilt bias’.  Nagao and David looked at criminal cases. They used two mock cases. 

The first was a rape case, severe crime, and the second was a vandalism case, non-severe crime. They allocated subjects to one of two mock juries. Group 1 of the mock jurors deliberated on the rape case first followed by the vandalism case.  Group 2 deliberated on the vandalism first then the rape case. They found that the juries showed significantly different patterns of conviction.  Group 1 convicted the vandalism defendants at a significantly higher rate than the second jury.  Group 2 convicted the rape defendants at a significantly lower rate than the first jury.   

This suggests that there is also an ‘innocent bias’.  They argued that the second jurors felt the burden of guilt less after they looked at the vandalism case first.  Vandals were found not guilty more often than defendants in the rape case.  So those who looked at the vandalism case first may have come to believe that people do sometimes get convicted of crimes that they have not committed, they therefore may have been more anxious about convicting an innocent person.  With the guilt bias, the severity of the rape case may have led to the jurors being harsher on the vandals.

What Next?

This course will provide you with detailed knowledge regarding criminal psychology, criminal profiling, legal terminology, forensics and more.  If you are looking to improve your knowledge, or improve your job and career prospects in this field, why not enrol on this course?

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