Small Group Research

Despite a presumption that laughter and a death penalty decision seem incompatible, transcript data of jury deliberations from both the guilt-or-innocence and penalty phases of the State of Ohio v. Mark Ducic trial demonstrate that jurors do laugh. Working from the disparate literature on laughter, we problematized laughter from a group communication perspective and analyzed its functionality in jury interaction. The authors identified and analyzed 51 laughter sequences across 414 transcript pages. Three categories of laughter functions (i.e., relational, processual, and informational) were identified; these categories were further detailed by 6, 10, and 10 subfunctions, respectively. Based on these findings, the authors revised their definition of laughter to incorporate its multifunctionality as vocalic and public emotional displays that (a) can be read as positive, negative, or ambiguous and (b) question, control, and regulate relationships, procedures, and information in the group. That laughter can be read in so many ways suggests that one role of laughter may be to create ambiguity to allow the group a chance to figure out what to do next.

This study employs interaction analysis to explore micro-level conflict processes and macro-level phasic structures of conflict management in two jury deliberations. Results indicate that the deliberations have fundamentally different conflict management processes. Differences in the tasks posed by the two deliberations and in the norms enacted in them, as well as microinteractional patterns, are posited to account for the divergent interaction processes.

Analysis of the transcript of a jury’s deliberations reveals a fourth production site for influence attempts beyond the three identified by Meyers and Brashers. The fourth site involves influence attempts by jurors to uphold the interests of a particular Court and a particular proceeding, and perhaps the interests of the larger judicial system. This gives the Institution a place at the table as an agent of influence, something that arguably generalizes beyond juries to all task groups embedded within organizations. The main part of the analysis identifies three main functions that were served by making the Institution’s presence at the table felt—directives, correctives of others’ positions and arguments, and justifications of positions and arguments. In addition, the analysis identifies two main ways that participants marked shifts in footing from speaking in their own voice to speaking in the Institution’s voice. The first is the use of direct quotations of the Court’s instructions. The second is the use of modal auxiliaries such as “should” and “need to,” that presuppose an external source of rules and obligations.

In this article, the authors examine argument in the interactions of members of a naturally occurring jury (State of Ohio v. Mark Ducic). Using the structurational concept of contradictions and a thematic analysis, the authors examine the forms and functions of group argument structures and the role of argument structuring in the jury’s penalty deliberation. Findings are discussed in terms of theoretical and methodological implications for structuration argument theory.

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.