Counterfactual Thinking in the Jury Room

There may be no more intense group task experience than serving as a decision-making juror on a death penalty case, where a group of strangers is asked to decide whether another person should live or die. Using the deliberation transcripts from the ABC News documentary In the Jury Room, the double homicide trial of State of Ohio v. Mark Ducic was examined to learn more about communication during a jury’s decision-making process. Counterfactual thinking involves the creation of fictional narratives (concerning past events or anticipated future events) about how an outcome might have been (or might still be) different. Decisional regret theory was used to assess if high salience of the evidence and verdict would produce counterfactual thinking for individual jurors and subsequent shared counterfactual talk during deliberations, as well as anticipatory regret for the decisional choices. Results found exemplars of shared counterfactual talk in both the guilt—innocence phase of deliberations and the sentencing phase, in which jurors considered the death penalty. In addition to counterfactual talk, jurors (both individually and in short dialogues) shared anxieties about anticipated verdict regret.